“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is a documentary film by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. Some of them were crafted as much as 32,000 years ago. In southern France, about 400 miles from Paris, the limestone cave contains a wealth of early paintings, perhaps from as long ago as 32,000 years. Here, amid gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and a carpet of animal bones, beautiful images of horses gallop on walls alongside bison and a ghostly menagerie of cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths. Multiple red palm prints of an early artist adorn one wall, as if to announce the birth of the first auteur. Surely there were other, previous artists those who first picked up a bit of charcoal, say, and scraped it on a stone but the Chauvet paintings are among the earliest known. Following an air current coming from the cliff, they dug and crawled their way into the cave, which had been sealed tight for some 20,000 years. The film consists of images from inside the cave as well as of interviews with various scientists and historians. The film also includes footage of the nearby Pont d’Arc natural bridge