01
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Why this pick
Herzog’s Amazon odyssey shares Fitzcarraldo’s elemental landscapes, obsessive antihero, and unnerving collision between European ambition and an indifferent wilderness.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1982 2h 37m DEU
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Fitzcarraldo
ActionAdventureDrama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Fitzcarraldo, try these.
01
02
The Mission
Why this pick
Its rain-soaked South American grandeur, operatic music, and doomed idealism echo the spiritual scale and cultural clash that make Fitzcarraldo so singular.
03
Embrace of the Serpent
Why this pick
This hallucinatory Amazon journey confronts colonial desire and spiritual mystery with the same sense of landscape as a force beyond any outsider’s control.
04
Burden of Dreams
Why this pick
Les Blank’s extraordinary documentary observes Herzog making Fitzcarraldo, turning the film’s real logistical madness and artistic obsession into an equally gripping experience.
05
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
Why this pick
Another Herzog portrait of a person pursuing the near-impossible, rendered with rapturous imagery and compassion for the dangerous intensity of private dreams.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Brian Sweeney "Fitzcarraldo" Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) is an Irishman living in Iquitos, a small city east of the Andes in the Amazon Basin in Peru in the early part of the 20th century, when the city grew exponentially during the rubber boom. He has an indomitable spirit, but is little more than a dreamer with one major failure already behind him – the bankrupted and incomplete Transandine Railway. A lover of opera and a great fan of the internationally known Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, he dreams of building an opera house in Iquitos. Numerous Europeans and North African Sephardic Jewish immigrants have settled in the city at this time, bringing their cultures with them. The opera house will require considerable amounts of money, which the booming rubber industry in Peru should yield in profits. The areas in the Amazon Basin known to contain rubber trees have been parceled up by the Peruvian government and are leased to private companies for exploitation.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Claudia Cardinale
Molly
Milton Nascimento
Blackman At Opera House
Klaus Kinski
Brian Sweeney 'Fitzcarraldo' Fitzgerald
José Lewgoy
Don Aquilino