For over sixty years Werner Herzog has been travelling the world, telling the stories of obsessive protagonists who are perhaps slightly mad. But that is a good thing, for there is more imaginative room in the world of the mad.

It is not hard to find a through line from terrific films he made with Klaus Kinski to this documentary with Dr. Steve Boyes and the master trackers of the San people on an expedition into Angola. They seek an elusive group of elephants, who may or may not exist, to find out whether they are the descendants of the largest elephant—and hence the largest land mammal on the planet—ever shot, whose carcass is on display at the Smithsonian. From kings to dung samples, from DNA to dreams, Herzog remains committed to a vision of science which allows room for myth and wonder, or as he puts it an “ecstatic reality.”