Article by Luca Delpiano

Translation by Virginia Milazzo

Presented to the 43rd Torino Film Festival’s documentaries competition, About a Hero ponders over the concept of representation itself during the era of generative technologies. A true-crime style mockumentary – guided by a fake AI generated Werner Herzog – intertwines the figure of the great German director with a sequence of real interviews: artists, scientists and philosophers who discuss the increasingly uncertain boundary between man and machine.

Through the adaptation of a screenplay written by an AI, previously trained on the entirety of Herzog’s work, the Polish director Piotr Winiewicz investigates the gap between fiction and documentary, which is also the space where many Herzog works are based on, resulting in a pamphlet on the pauperization of the testimonial value of image. Thanks to these new technologies, an image can exist without it being linked to any referent: it becomes a separated entity, something that’s just there, in front of us. It’s not a living being, nor some kind of reality. Seeing these non-existent people, who look like humans in the flesh but are typically marked by an almost deadly detachment, inevitably causes bewilderment. Herzog’s investigation on AI examines the death of a workman who was morbidly obsessed with a machine symbolizes this crisis: a man ends up perceiving himself alike to the object he’s obsessed with. Other grotesque episodes, such as the one where a woman is in love with her toaster, amplify this paradox: is the human humanizing the machine or mechanizing himself?

The film reflects on the existence of a primordial matrix of mankind and whether it has a soul or not. If God made man in his image, human beings can’t help but search for these shards of resemblance in themselves and, in the meanwhile, wander in the land of dissimilarity. This way, Winiewicz probes the incapability of man to depict himself.

Article published on “la Repubblica” online on November 24th 2025