Werner Herzog has been named the 2016 Guggenheim Honoree by the American Film Institute. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

He rescued Joaquin Phoenix from a car wreck. He was struck by an air rifle in the middle of an interview (and called it “an insignificant bullet”). He thinks chickens are “the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creatures in the world”. He chewed off his frost-bitten fingers in Siberia (albeit as a fictional Russian villain in Jack Reacher). And now, perhaps a year too late (does anybody really think 2015 honoree Alex Gibney deserved it more?), director Werner Herzog has been named the 2016 Guggenheim Honoree by the American Film Institute.

And he’s coming to town.

Herzog is no stranger to the Washington area. He staged the Richard Wagner opera Tannhauser in Baltimore in 2000, and made a number of appearances introducing local screenings in the ’90s. He was in D.C. often enough that local audiences could listen to his dryly delivered anecdotes develop over time. One year he’d tell an audience, “I call each grey hair on my head Kinski,” after the volatile actor who appeared in several of his films; a few years later, he’d tell moviegoers, “I call every white hair on my head Kinski.”

Through the Charles Guggenheim Symposium, AFI DOCS recognizes documentary filmmakers who have made a lasting impact in non-fiction cinema. Even Herzog’s fiction films (like Fitzcarraldo, for which the director infamously had a riverboat hauled over a mountain) can seem like harrowing documentaries. His non-fiction films have included the 1971 film Fata Morgana, an evocative visit to the Sahara desert; and Grizzly Man, the 2005 portrait of nature lover Timothy Treadwell, who was killed while tracking bears in Alaska.

Herzog will appear at the Newseum on June 24 for a symposium moderated by director Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop). The discussion will be followed by a screening of Herzog’s latest documentary, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Tickets to the symposium and to AFI Docs will be available to AFi members on May 9, and to the general public on May 18.

AFI Docs runs from June 22-26. Stay tuned for more DCist coverage of the festival in June.