National Geographic Documentary Films has acquired the U.S. streaming rights to Werner Herzog‘s new feature-length documentary Ghost Elephants, which had its world premiere at the Venice film festival on Wednesday. The doc will go out on Disney+ and Hulu in the U.S..
Herzog wrote, directed and narrates the documentary, in which he follows conservation biologist Steve Boyes, in his search to prove the existence of the mysterious, perhaps mythical, herd of ghost elephants in the highlands of Angola.
“After meeting Steve Boyes, an unexpected project that felt like the hunt for Moby Dick, the White Whale, came at me with great urgency,” Herzog said in a statement. “Like many of my films, this is an exploration of dreams, of imagination — weighed against reality. The film took me to what the local tribesmen call the Land at the End of the Earth.”
Herzog has built much of his career around portraits of obsessive, driven figures whose ambitions push them to the edge of madness or transcendence. From Klaus Kinski’s mad conquistador in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), who drags his men ever deeper into the jungle in a delusional quest for El Dorado, or the rubber baron in Fitzcarraldo (1982), who dreams of hauling a steamship over a mountain to build an opera house in the Amazon, to documentaries such as Grizzly Man (2005), about Timothy Treadwell’s fatal devotion to living among wild bears in Alaska, and Encounters at the End of the World (2007), which follows scientists, divers, and dreamers whose obsessions carry them to the most inhospitable place on earth.
Ghost Elephants premiered out of competition at the Venice film festival on Wednesday and will have its U.S. premiere at Telluride. Herzog received a lifetime achievement Golden Lion in Venice on Wednesday night. Italian-American cinema icon Francis Ford Coppola presented him with the honor. “It’s not enough to praise Werner Herzog. One must celebrate the fact that someone like him can actually exist,” said Coppola in his laudatio.
Ghost Elephants will Stream on Disney+ and Hulu in 2026.
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For a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes has been in search of a mysterious elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, a wooded plateau — virtually uninhabited, but in size as large as England. He sets out with master trackers from Namibia, the best remaining in the world, but there is a deep underlying question: would it not be better to keep these gigantic elephants rather as a dream, as ghosts, as the White Whale, than finding them in reality?
director’s statement
After meeting Steve Boyes, an unexpected project that felt like the hunt for Moby Dick, the White Whale, came at me with great urgency. Like many of my films, this is an exploration of dreams, of imagination — weighed against reality. The film took me to what the local tribesmen call the Land at the End of the Earth.
Synopsis:
In the mist-covered highlands of Angola, deep within Africa’s last great subtropical forest, a mystery endures: the elusive ghost elephants of Lisima—potential living descendants of the largest land mammal ever recorded.
