Award-winning filmmaker Werner Herzog is perhaps best known recently for his film Grizzly Man (trailer here), a documentary about the end of Timothy Treadwell’s life. Treadwell was a sort of obsessive naturalist who spent 13 years visiting the national parks of Alaska trying to live among the bears. He filmed bears, filmed himself tracking them and even interacting with them. Tragically, he also had a camera rolling when a bear finally attacked and ate him, almost all of which is off-camera. But Herzog pieced together his portrait from 100 hours of Treadwell’s film.

Herzog brings his new film, Encounters at the End of the World,  to town this week. There will be a screening and a Q&A with the director, which might be a good place to get a preview of his planned filming of The Bad Liutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Herzog’s Encounters is about Antarctica and the tiny scientific population that inhabits the continent. Technically the ice-covered mass is a desert, receiving little or no precipitation through the year, and temperatures in the interior plunge to lower than –100 degrees farhenheit. A total of less than 1,000 scientists live at the pole year-round.

The screening is at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, July 12, at the Prytania Theatre (5339 Prytania St.). The event is a benefit for the New Orleans Film Society. Tickets $10 general admission, $8 NOFS members.

Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant has stirred some controversy, and he has said that it is not a remake of the 1992 Abel Ferrara film of the same name, which starred Harvey Keitel as a grizzled and abusive New York cop. Herzog’s film is supposed to star Nicholas Cage and Eva Mendes and begin filming in late summer.