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 in the Amazon jungle, one thousand miles away from civilization.

Featuring visceral interviews with Herzog, the film depicts the full range of Herzog’s unflinching vision spanning four years of production, despite all odds. 

Most notoriously, the film features a jaw-dropping sequence featuring Herzog requiring hundreds of native Campa, Machiguenga, and Aguaruna people 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 Herzog, 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.

Blank’s appreciation for the jungle comes through in his uninflected photography of insects, birds, and even the feet and faces of his Peruvian subjects – as frequently set against the classical music that Herzog used in Fitzcarraldo.

Although Blank only visited Herzog’s remote shoot twice — for several weeks at a time — he and his editor/sound technician Maureen Gosling capture the full range of Herzog’s tribulations. Violent conflicts between hostile natives and the jungle’s chaos present Herzog and his multicultural skeleton crew with exotic challenges.

In English, Spanish & German with English subtitles
Director: Les Blank with Maureen Gosling (US/West Germany 1982) 94 min.