The Flying Doctors of East Africa (German: Die Fliegenden Ärzte von Ostafrika) is a 1969 documentary film by Werner Herzog about the "flying doctors" service of the African Medical and Research Foundation in Tanzania, Kenya, and Nairobi. The film is a fairly conventional documentary made during the filming of Herzog's more stylized films Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small.
Herzog was asked to make this film by some friends of the doctors themselves. The film consists mostly of factual accounts of the doctors' service, mostly avoiding the surrealism and stylizations that characterize the typical Herzog film. Herzog has said, "I do not even call it a film, it is much more a Bericht, a report."
Famous quotes containing the words flying, doctors, east and/or africa:
“The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“While the doctors consult, the patient dies.”
—English proverb.
“The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.”
—Dee Brown (b. 1908)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)