Reviews & Ratings for
Wings of Hope (TV) More at IMDbPro »Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel (original title)

10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
A tenacious lady and the man who gave her wings (or hope), 14 November 2004
Author: Sinnerman from Singapore

To understand the genius of Werner Herzog, one need look no further than this quirky documentary.

By sheer stroke of luck, I attended a talk by Beat Presser (a photographer collaborator of Herzog's in the seminal Fitzcarraldo). The talk was entitled, "Werner At Work", where we'd see Beat's exclusive footage of Herzog during his filming sessions of Cobra Verde, Invincible and yes, Wings of Hope.

During one presentation, we saw the footage Beat shot of Herzog filming the "Wings of hope" woman. She was seen wandering around the Zoology Museum where she worked. The woman merely she strolled along the shelves of animal specimens. She's also trying her earnest best to follow the subtle nudges from the man behind the camera. In Beat's footage, those shots were actually very matter of fact. Its just the woman, trailed by Herzog, a camera man and a sound guy. But Herzog's midas touch (read: embellishment) transformed those shot footage into a re-enactment of the woman's "dream sequence' in the final take of Wings of Hope. Wow. I couldn't stop laughing.

Herzog is such a zany genius. I love the guy. Love him!!!

5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Haunting, metaphysical documentary about a modern Lazarus.(possible spoiler in last paragraph), 6 February 2001

Author: Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Herzog's idiosyncratic documentaries may not be to all tastes. Anyone raised on the spurious objectivity of the British documentary tradition - still pervasive today, with its illusion of enquiry, even-handedness and recourse to eye-witness and expert - may balk at the aggressive subjectivity of Herzog's films, which often tightropes the abyss of egotism. For instance, his intrusive commentary, often breaking in on the ostensible subject's account; the concomitant imposing of his own concerns onto another's experience; his stylising 'realistic' subject matter as he tries to create dream-like effects or utter mystical prognostications.

These are all valid complaints, and there are times when Herzog exasperates even the most fervent admirer. But 'Wings of Hope' isn't really a documentary if we accept the definition of that form as the recording and shaping of reality. The film's subject is Juliane Koepcke, a German biologist who, in 1971, was the only survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian jungles. Herzog invites her over a quarter of a century on to retrace her steps as she walked, eventually in a starved trance, for over ten days to rescue.

The film is 'documentary' in the sense that we sift through the rubble of the crash, now so entangled in verdure that it has become part of the forest; we hear Juliane's eye-witness testimony; we catch a glimpse of horrendous socio-economic realities that persist in the region, such as the fisherman who rescued her being refused entry on a boat after he is bitten by a stingray because he can't afford the fare, or the murderous short-cuts taken by businesses that result in plane crashes.

But filmmakers are attracted to a particular subject for subjective reasons, because it interests them. Juliane is a typical Herzog protagonist (although, rarely, a woman), someone who leaves the realm of civilisation (she had just attended her graduation ball after completing her secondary education) and is plunged into the unknowable world of nature, where reason is as much a hindrance as a help, where the mind is eventually worn out, and the protagonist becomes a near-zombie, buffeted, aided, or destroyed by nature. The fact that this is a 'true' story seems to give credence to the seemingly wilder fancies of Herzog's fiction; a clip from his masterpiece, 'Aguirre, Wrath of God' is shown here.

This is where the film's real meat is. Herzog himself was due to take the fatal plane on his way to shoot 'Aguirre'. The film is as much haunted with Herzog's own brush with mortality, his own sense of reprieve, as it is with the survival and second chance of Juliane. This knowledge excuses, even engenders, the dream sense that intrudes, and finally engulfs the film.

But even without this knowledge, this documentary could only have gone in this direction. This isn't a film about a crash and its aftermath, but the journey of a woman through her own memories, and the viewer's empathy with, or recreation of them. Thus a concrete genre used to record reality becomes an abstract means of intimating what cannot be shown, time, memory, history, dream. This is not all Herzog's doing - Juliane's descriptions of the crash, for instance, have a startling poetic beauty that transcends or transforms a horrific reality into something Other.

This domain is usually that of Chris Marker (with more politics, of course), and there is an extraordinary sequence in Juliane's biological museum, with its dead, classified, even extinct species being explained by a woman who herself literally rose from the dead, and accompanied by Herzog's speculative narration, that approximates the effect of Marker's 'La Jetee'. Hence the chilling beauty of the final images, the admission that the documentary is inadequate to record certain realities, that people have to be left to their own memories and recreations of the past, a doomed project.

3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Wings of Hope, 10 January 2012

Author: Martin Teller from Portland OR

Another remarkable Herzog doc, about Juliane Koepcke, the 17 year-old sole survivor of a 1971 plane crash in the Peruvian jungle. 27 years later, Herzog takes her to visit the crash site and retrace her nine-day journey to rescue. The tale has many fascinating elements, not the least of which is the fact that Herzog himself was almost on that flight, on his way to film AGUIRRE. Then there's the man with a special role in the story, and who almost lost his life helping with the documentary. The film contains the usual enigmatic Herzogian touches like his poetic narration and strange detours. One of my favorite moments was actually one of the least relevant: a minute is taken to film a young girl delighted with the camera. An upbeat glimmer of innocence in this story of someone facing the abyss and emerging through the other side, haunted forever but still alive.

3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Just see the film and don't let my words spoil a great story, 30 April 2008

Author: dbborroughs from Glen Cove, New York

Christmas 1971. A plane full of people crashes into the Amazon Jungle. A massive search is started and the wreckage is found. Despite the best efforts of rescuers no one is found alive and the search is called off. 16 Days later Juliane Koepcke, aged 17 stumbles out of the jungle, the only survivor.

Leave it to Werner Herzog to talk Juliane to go back into the jungle and show us what it was like. Amazing, hypnotic film who's subject haunted Herzog for decades-he was in the airport at the time the plane took off during his time making Aguirre. Clearly Herzog's obsession is our gain since this is a film that you fall into and watch in a state of wondrous disbelief. the thought of what this young girl went through is mind blowing, even if you take into account that she was raised in the jungle at a scientific station. No matter how you slice it she was ten ways to Sunday lucky. Julianne tells us what happened in a weird detached manner of fact manner that is strangely inviting and yet eerily unemotional. As she says she has wall up that will keep her safe. Its a wild film of an amazing story, a sibling of Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Aguirre. I kept thinking that someone should turn it into a movie---and then Herzog shows clips from the movie that was made of the story complete with catty commentary by Juliane Koepcke who is standing in the jungle laughing at the silliness of it. I was very amused.

See this film. It will amaze you. Better it will entertain and inform you.

4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Brilliant, 2 March 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Wings of Hope (2000)

**** (out of 4)

A rather amazing, harrowing and inspirational documentary from Werner Herzog about a 1971 plane crash in a South American jungle. A plane loaded with 92 passengers crashed in this jungle and only a seventeen-year-old woman survived. This woman, Juliane Koepcke, had to fight her way through the jungle before being found twelve days after the crash. Herzog takes this woman back to the scene of the crash and they hike through the jungle showing us the paths she took to live. This is a brilliant documentary that has a claustrophobic feel because it's simply amazing that this woman would survive the crash and it's even more amazing that she'd be able to find her way out of this jungle. Another curious note is that Herzog himself was getting ready to film Aguirre, the Wrath of God and was going to take this same flight but it was sold out. Seeing the woman going through the wreck site was also fascinating but depressing considering all the things we see.

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
"Theirs was the worst reputation imaginable", 16 May 2007
Author: sorryevil from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This film is more affecting for me than Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Herzog's other jungle crash and escape documentary, with which it has many parallels in style and substance. More people need to see it. It was on Google Video for a short time, and is included on a short documentary DVD set. As with a lot of the director's work, he inserts himself shamelessly into the action. He takes the crash survivor Juliane on a plane, and his face is on the edge of the frame, asking, "How do you feel?" But she does not bite. For the first half of the movie, she is stoic and without emotion, the perfect foil for Werner. He has her stand and make monologues awkwardly, and her quiet voice is dubbed in English, making her even more remote. But as it progresses, as she goes to the crash site and each piece of wreckage is methodically shown to her, she eventually gets a little more animated, and it breaks my heart every time, the slow process by which a survivor of trauma allows themselves to feel the things which happened to them. She dismisses the TV movie-of-the-week about her (a bad actress runs from things, befriends monkeys), and we see a clip of it, and she contrasts it with how she spend her actual time in the jungle. She talks about a type of a bird (in a glass cage, in a (her?) museum) that was her "savior." Most importantly, her intellect, not her heart, saves her: she follows small rivers to large ones, and large rivers to civilization.

Werner's wonderful shamelessness about breaking documentary nonfictional piety has two amazing payoffs here. One, showing her a new piece of wreckage far-off from the crash site, he speaks in dubbed English about the horrible history of the airline, how it used motorcycle mechanics, and overpacked its airliners so more people died than necessary. He stands there, demanding emotion from her, in front of the camera, and she says, "Yes, theirs was the worst reputation imaginable." I wrote this on the marker board in my cubicle. If you're surviving, you keep the emotions tight. You move, you think, you don't dwell. Julianne is still doing this, decades later.

And second, the ending. (SPOILER of sorts) I interpret the beautiful ending as cynical on the part of our director. It contradicts the movie in front of it, full of the romantic idea of being rescued, implying death, and showing instead, her rescuer, himself today an injured man being helped up an embankment by his family. I love it, I watch it over and over. (SPOILER)

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