cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Herzog again turns an impossible colonial-era dream into a punishing river journey, with monumental landscapes, obsessive folly and a near-documentary sense that nature is quietly overpowering everyone.
02
Why this pick
Its Amazonian voyage shares Aguirre’s hallucinatory isolation and mistrust of colonial ambition, but observes the encounter through an Indigenous perspective and stark, entrancing black-and-white imagery.
03
Why this pick
A visually majestic South American colonial drama in which faith, conquest and wilderness collide. It has Aguirre’s moral unease and overwhelming rainforest presence, with a more classical emotional sweep.
04
Why this pick
Malick renders colonization as an immersive, unstable meeting of bodies, landscape and competing desires. Its drifting camera and natural-world intensity echo the hypnotic, ominous beauty of Aguirre.
05
Why this pick
Though set in the twentieth century, this is another feverish expedition into hostile jungle terrain, powered by fraying alliances, mounting physical ordeal and the feeling of doom closing in.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
In 1560, several score of Spaniards conquistadors, and a hundred Indigenous peoples of the Americas slaves, march down from the newly conquered Inca Empire in the Andes mountains into the jungles to the east, in search of the fabled country of El Dorado. Under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés), the men, clad in half personal armor, pull cannons down narrow mountainous paths and through dense, muddy jungle. On New Year's Eve, reaching the end of his supplies and unable to go on without more information, Pizarro orders a group of forty men to scout ahead by raft down river. If they do not return to the main party within one week with news of what lies beyond, they will be considered lost. Pizarro chooses Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) as the commander of the expedition, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as his second-in-command, fat nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling) representing Spanish Royal Family and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro (actor)) to bring the word of God. Also accompanying the expedition, against Pizarro's better judgment, are Ursúa's mistress, Doña Inés (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre's teenage daughter, Florés (Cecilia Rivera, in her only film role).
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Don Lope de Aguirre
Inez de Atienza
Perucho
