Burden of Dreams (1982)

New 4K Restoration

Burden of Dreams captures legendary director Werner Herzog’s filming of his most ambitious film Fitzcarraldo, in which an entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski) endeavors to push a steamship over a mountain to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle.

For nearly five years, Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, the story of one man’s attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog’s determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of indigenous Peruvians to pull a full-size, 320-ton steamship over a small mountain. The result is an extraordinary document of the filmmaking process and a unique look into the single-minded mission of one of cinema’s most fearless directors.

Blank’s interviews with Hersog, bring context and backstory to his personalized style of “ethnographic filmmaking,” which values Peru’s native, Campa, Machiguenga, and Aguaruna people and their Old World culture as much as it does Herzog’s perilous enterprise.

Directed by Les Blank with Maureen Gosling

1982 | USA | Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese langauge with English subtitles | DCP

Rated NR