Environmental anthropologist Kerllen Costa (far left), conservationist Steve Boyes (second left) and Angolan hunter-guides search for ghost elephants, possibly shown below

Ariel Leon Isacovitch

Ghost Elephants

Werner Herzog, Disney+

Film director Werner Herzog has always been drawn to the limits of human knowledge – to the places where science meets myth, where discovery shades into obsession. In

Ghost Elephants , which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, he follows conservationist Steve Boyes in Angola as he searches for a herd of elephants that may or may not exist. It is both a scientific expedition and a philosophical fable that asks what it means to chase a dream that could easily remain just that.

The premise is strikingly simple. Boyes believes that there has been a sighting of a group of unusually large elephants, possibly related to the legendary Fnykvi specimen preserved at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.…