Day by day

INTO THE ABYSS: A tale of Death, a tale of Life

UK, Austria // 2011 // Couleur // 105'
English with French subtitles

Texas, 24 October 2001. For a car, two youths kill three people. Arrest, incarceration, trial. Jason Burkett is sentenced to life imprisonment, Michael Perry to death by lethal injection. In Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog records the comments of the two culprits, as well as those of the police, of a repentant executioner and of Burkett’s astounding wife, who chose to marry and bear the child of a man sentenced to at least 40 years in jail. He invites us to understand the depth of the social abyss in which this tragedy is rooted: a North American Third World that annihilates all those who grow up in it. In doing so, he reminds us that, no matter the horror of the crime, nothing ever justifies the death penalty.

Werner Herzog