Wings of Hope (2000)

Original title

Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel

Directed by

Werner Herzog

Genre

documentary film

Country

Germany

Runtime

1h 05m

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 36 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Werner Herzog returns to the Peruvian jungle with Juliane Koepcke the sole survivor of a 1971 plane crash. They visit the crash site retrace her 10 day walk through the rainforest and meet the men who found her. The film probes how she survived and how the experience shaped her life.

factualreflectivedeliberatequietsomberdocumentary-styleslow-paced

What happens

Wings of Hope (German: Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel, literally "Juliane's Fall into the Jungle") is a 1998 made-for-TV documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film explores the story of Juliane Koepcke, a German Peruvian woman who was the sole survivor of Peruvian flight LANSA Flight 508 following its mid-air disintegration after a lightning strike in 1971. Herzog was inspired to make this film since he had narrowly avoided taking the same flight while he was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God; his reservation had been canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary. In the film, Herzog and Koepcke visit the scenes of her flight, crash, and escape from the jungle. They take a flight from Lima to Pucallpa (though with a different airline), and sit in the same row of seats where Koepcke sat during the crash. They unearth many large fragments of the plane in the jungle, and then visit the river routes where she traveled for 10 days on foot, and the small village where she was eventually found by three men, one of whom appears in the film. Wings of Hope is often seen as a companion piece or sequel to Herzog's 1997 film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, in which he retraces the steps of a U.S. Navy pilot's successful escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam War. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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