Directed by Werner Herzog | 76 mins | 1971
Herzog’s idea of turning the Sahara and Sahel Deserts into the setting for a kind of sci-fi docu-fiction was nixed upon his arrival, but after a long and perilously high-stakes production—with the director subject briefly to imprisonment and then a nasty parasite infection—"Fata Morgana" at last shimmered into existence as something even less categorizable: an abstract existential quest undergirded by a reworking of the Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh.