Environmental anthropologist Kerllen Costa (far left), conservationist Steve Boyes (second from left) and Angolan hunter-guides search for ghost elephants, possibly pictured below
Ariel Leon Isacovitch
Ghost elephants
Werner Herzog, Disney+
Film director Werner Herzog has always been drawn to the frontiers of human knowledge – to the places where science meets myth, where discovery turns into obsession. IN
Ghost elephantswhich premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, follows conservationist Steve Boyes in Angola as he searches for a herd of elephants that may or may not exist. It is both a scientific expedition and a philosophical fable that asks what it means to chase a dream that might as well remain just that.
The premise is surprisingly simple. Boyes believes there has been a sighting of a group of unusually large elephants, possibly related to the legendary Fnykvi specimen held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Named after the engineer and big game hunter Josef Fnykvi who shot it, it is one of the largest land mammals ever to be exhibited, standing almost a meter taller than the average African elephant. Elephants may roam the remote Bi Plateau, a sparsely populated forested area roughly the size of England.
Boyes supported this hypothesis for decades, gathering anecdotal evidence from San master trackers, whose ability to read tracks in the earth remains one of the most sophisticated of any surviving hunter-gatherer culture. If found, these “ghost elephants” could improve biologists’ understanding of elephant genetics, gigantism and migration patterns in one of the least-explored parts of Africa.
However, Herzog is never content to tell a straightforward natural history story. His generous narration, in a style that is part professorial, part skeptical and part humorous, frames Boyes’ project in a larger context. What begins as a search for DNA samples becomes a reflection on how science and imagination intersect. He compares Boyes’s pursuit to Captain Ahab’s hunt for the White Whale, although here the obsession is not destructive but generative, fueled by the belief that something vast and hidden still lies behind the human gaze.
An elephant – perhaps a ghost elephant – captured by a motion-controlled camera
The Wilderness Project Archive
The film’s scientific content is carefully woven into its narrative fabric. Viewers see Boyes and his team prepare their expedition gear, negotiate access with local leaders, and conduct fieldwork in terrain that challenges both them and their tools.
The film doesn’t offer hard data—it’s not a peer-reviewed publication, after all—but captures the real-time methodology of field science: hypotheses, observations, inferences, and careful drawing of conclusions. The final discovery, tentative and incomplete, remains less a spectacle than a slow accumulation of evidence, a rhythm the film embraces with its measured pace.
Herzog also uses the camera to expand the frame of the investigation. The cinematography is reminiscent of polished textures National Geographic documentaries, yet always carries Herzog’s curiosity. Sweeping aerial shots of the plateau convey the immensity of the landscape, while detailed studies of the tracks of trackers reading the tracks on the ground reveal a parallel science rooted in embodied knowledge.
The San people, among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, carry genetic lineages that diverged from other humans until 200,000 years ago. Their surveillance expertise is not considered folklore, but a form of empirical knowledge honed over millennia—science before laboratories.
The search for elephants inevitably becomes a prism for larger themes. Climate change, colonialism and the aftershocks of industrial exploitation surface in Herzog’s commentary, which is never heavy-handed but persistent. The Angolan plains, once scarred by war, are now a place where conservation, indigenous sovereignty and environmental responsibility intersect. Boyes’s search underscores the paradox of conservation science: to study is to intervene, and the very act of seeking conservation can change what is found.
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The film is a scientific expedition and fable that asks what it means to chase a dream that might just stay
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In Herzog’s hands, phantom elephants remain both a possibility and a metaphor—fascinating creatures that embody a desire for mystery that science has yet to tame. The message is clear: research is not only about what we find, but also about the humility of not knowing and the persistence to ask questions at the edge of knowledge.
Davide Abbatatescianni is a film critic based in Rome
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