
From One Second to the Next
Werner Herzog directs this short film on texting while driving, built entirely from interviews with the people left behind by a few seconds of distraction. A young woman paralyzed from the neck down describes the crash that ended her old life. Parents describe identifying their children after a collision caused by a driver checking a phone. The drivers themselves appear too, including a man who killed three members of an Amish family and struggles to explain, on camera, how sending a text felt worth the risk. Herzog keeps the camera still and lets faces and silences do the work rather than narration or statistics, though the film opens with the scale of the problem: over 100,000 accidents a year in the United States involve a driver who was texting. There are no reenactments, no dramatic score, just people who have to live with what happened. It was produced for driver's education classrooms, but it plays as a plain, unflinching record of consequence.