Fitzcarraldo

D: Werner Herzog, Germany 1982, 158 min

A river steamer right in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and a mountain to scale. A man in a white suit standing before it, ready to use every earthly power to conquer it. This scene wrote Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski into film history in 1982. The story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald alias Fitzcarraldo, whose dream was to build his own opera house in the middle of the wilderness, touches on the primordial will of man to overcome nature. Because rapids obstruct the path of his rubber liner to the Amazon, Fitzcarraldo insists on transporting the ship across the jungle with the help of the local Indians. But he did not reckon with the power of the river gods.