In 2018, the couple Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin made a splash at the Telluride Film Festival with their film, Free Solo. At that time, they were known for their 2015 Meru, another documentary about mountain climbing. However, Solo changed everything for them. It was a massive hit at the box office, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and suddenly Vasarhelyi and Chin became major names in the industry. In the following years, they stayed quiet for a while. Yet, in 2021, they released The Rescue, an innovative film about the rescue of a children’s football team in Thailand. After that release, they launched at least a new project each year. In 2022, Return to Space, Wild Life, and Nyad in 2023, Endurance in 2024, and two works this year: Love+War and Lost in the Jungle. Hence, they became the immediate authors to tackle recent tragedies and high-profile nature documentaries, which they release through their deal with National Geographic.
The first of the two films of the year, Lost in the Jungle, is the first option. It narrates an accident in the Colombian Amazon. In 2023, a story impressed the world. After a deadly plane crash over the Amazon jungle, four children survived for forty days. The eldest, Lesly, was thirteen years old. She took care of her three siblings, who were nine, five, and eleven months old. The children were with their mother, Magdalena, who was moving them from an indigenous tribe to Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. However, their mother died in the crash. In this sense, the oldest, who dropped out of school to take care of their home and siblings, became the natural guardian for the three of them. They waited, wandering in circles until the rescue force found them.
There is an obvious similarity to The Rescue, which also tells the story of the odyssey to save those children. Both situations are tragedies on a grand scale, events that require the most from victims’ families and from the state’s professionals who ought to organize the bureaucratic structure to save those in dire need. Yet, the director’s duo makes a few creative choices to tell this story. Firstly, we only see Lesly from her back; the audience never sees her face. In this sense, there is the use of event reconstruction, such as their boarding the small plane, and the use of ludic drawings to emulate a child-like style. Therefore, similar to their 2021 film, which used CGI to simulate the children’s rescue, Lost in the Jungle uses a few tools to protect the children’s identities and prevent them from experiencing trauma. Another central element in the film is the co-direction with Juan Camilo Cruz, a Colombian filmmaker.
In this sense, the directors have to be careful when approaching the rescue force. Sure, the victims were children in the woods for almost a month and a half. Yet, the task force comprises military groups, used to combat the FARC, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group. Therefore, it is notable that the approach to Colombia’s local intricacies includes additional care for them. Consequently, Camilo Cruz’s credit may be the most innovative aspect of this film, which, in comparison to their past works, is a lackluster telling of a historical event. Unfortunately, the structure, which despite its conventionality, does not provide enough substance to understand this story properly. Thus, there is a whole subplot about the domestic violence of Lesly’s stepfather with her and Magdalena, his toxic behavior, and even the protection from the FARC, who promise to murder him if he continues to beat them.
The frontal plotline about the step-father is arguably the most elaborated and well-developed in the whole film. The grand rescue and the survival story of the four siblings becomes an anecdote, which occasionally introduces a few more details about how they spent forty days alone in the Amazon, one of the most complex ecosystems in the world. The duo of editors, Flavia de Souza and Deborah Dickson, utilizes multiple flashbacks to contextualize the family’s dynamics in the fatal accident. Every opportunity to advance the story, their flashback tool prevents it from becoming more exciting storytelling, and it harms the film’s structure. It is a work that constantly goes back and forth, probably to protect the children’s identities and privacy, but it diminishes the impact of this event.
Thus, Lost in the Jungle is the weakest work in Vasarhelyi and Chin’s catalogue due to the lack of effort in the structure that made them household names in documentary filmmaking. Hence, their collaboration with Juan Camilo Cruz results in a lackluster documentary that narrates an event that is nowhere near their more cinematic projects, such as The Rescue. It is more of a cable TV documentary than any of the highlights of their filmography.
Lost in the Jungle is streaming on Hulu.
Learn more about the film on Hulu.
You might also like…
