Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)

Herzog's most tender documentary, and the proof that his curiosity was about people long before it was about volcanoes. He follows Fini Straubinger, a German woman who became deafblind early in life, as she visits others living the same way and tries to reach those even more cut off than she is. The airplane ride she and her friends take is the moment people remember, and it lands because the film never treats them as curiosities. It is quiet and slow, and it asks for a patience it fully repays.