While Werner Herzog is known as a driven and obsessive filmmaker with stories of the making of the films often overshadowing the work. He’s also a skilled documentarian who constantly pushes at the expectations and structure of the documentary form. In The White Diamond he tells us the story of a man who wants to fly a beautiful balloon over the rainforest of Guyana. But it’s much more than that and the story unfolds in a casual, almost accidental way, that conceals the careful control and structure of the entire film. A wonderful and elegiac portrait of fascinating people in unique situations.

I think this was really interesting.. and quite different to other documentaries I’ve seen. It seemed like the main interesting part was the story of coping with a friends death. But this wasnt the main thing I liked about it.

I think the thing that intriguied me the most was the way they really managed to capture an engineer’s love of design and how all consuming they get over a project. To see the guy’s eyes light up when he talked about the air ship was pretty neat.