Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

In the late 1970s, celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola and his cast, crew and family ventured into the dense jungles of the Philippines to begin work on what would eventually become his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. But the journey from page to screen soon spiralled into a hellish, life-threatening nightmare that echoed the film's narrative. Plagued with adversity, one of the most influential films ever made had one of the most notorious shoots in cinema history that few survived unscathed. Based on secret tape recordings and documentary footage shot by Eleanor Coppola at the time, HEARTS OF DARKNESS is a harrowing documentary about a disastrous ordeal that transmuted into one of the greatest films of all time. As Francis Ford Coppola said in a 1979 Cannes press conference, “My film isn’t about Vietnam, my film is Vietnam.”

Directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola