The headlines are full of terrible stories, calamities and disasters that change lives in an instant. So if you’re going to turn one into a documentary for strangers to watch, I think you have the responsibility to explore the larger context around the event, the things the headlines can’t reveal. The filmmakers behind “Lost in the Jungle” (streaming on Disney+) understand this, and find the larger tale in their real-life thriller.
You may recall the setup from the news. In 2023, a tiny plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest. The only survivors were four siblings from the Huitoto Indigenous community: Lesly, 13 at the time of the crash; Soleiny, 9; Tien, 5; and Cristin, 11 months old. They were on their way with their mother, Magdalena, to Bogotá, where they were set to move in with Tien and Cristin’s father, Manuel Ranoque.
But the children were now alone, so together they braved the terrain and the wildlife for 40 days and nights. Meanwhile, in a mission code-named Operation Hope, Colombian special forces teamed up, somewhat reluctantly, with Indigenous people to search for the children. They were at last successful, and the story made international news.
For “Lost in the Jungle,” the directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Americans who made “Free Solo”) and Juan Camilo Cruz (a Colombian filmmaker who directed “Country of Lost Children”) take the story as a springboard to explore parts of the rescue account that didn’t always make the news. Interviews with some of the men who looked for the children as well as video shot during the operation help illustrate how difficult the task was. More interesting is the firsthand account from the children themselves, especially Lesly, who as the eldest found herself responsible for keeping her siblings alive in a wilderness that yielded few options for them to eat, but plenty for them to be eaten. Line-drawn animation occasionally depicts the children’s descriptions of what they saw in the jungle.
Two other threads in the story are more interesting, and more troubling. The first has to do with Ranoque, who according to interviews in the film had a difficult and at times violent relationship with his wife, whose family ultimately ended up taking in the children. Though he’s interviewed, he does not come across well at all — a fact the film seems cognizant of — and the reasons his family was traveling to Bogotá become more complicated as time goes on. (In recent months, he’s been convicted of raping a minor, unrelated to the story.)
The more culturally consequential story here, however, is the way that the Colombian military commandos had to concede power to Indigenous people whom they mistrusted and who, in turn, mistrusted them. The reasons for this mistrust date back decades, having to do with colonialist trauma as well as intricate dynamics involving narco-guerrilla groups in the region.
To find the children, however, the military and the Indigenous communities had to work together, because each possessed the kinds of knowledge and power that the other needed. Several times, the Indigenous men relied on ceremonies involving mambé powder (derived from coca and other plants) as a tool to help them find the children, and it appeared to bear fruit, even though the commandos didn’t fully understand what was happening.
“Lost in the Jungle” can’t really explain how the children survived, or how, ultimately, they were rescued. Miracles and mysteries happen in the jungle. What the film does elucidate, in rich and tense storytelling, is that no headline story like this is ever as simple as it seems on the surface. Peeling back a story’s layers reveals centuries of complex history — something a documentary can explore, if not completely, at least more thoroughly.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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