Next showing: Arrupe Hall, 114 Mount Street, London W1K 3AH — 6.30pm for a 7.00pm start, Thursday 28th May 2026
Cost: Free entry. Refreshments provided. Donations welcome.
Presenting: Fitzcarraldo (2 hours 28 minutes)
Fitzcarraldo (1982), directed by Werner Herzog, is a two-and-a-half-hour epic adventure-drama set in the Peruvian Amazon.
The film stars Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald—known as “Fitzcarraldo”—an Irish would-be rubber baron driven by an obsessive ambition to build an opera house deep in the jungle. In order to finance this dream, he seeks to profit from the region’s rubber trade, which requires him to undertake an extraordinary and seemingly impossible undertaking: transporting a massive steamship over a mountain in order to access an otherwise unreachable river system.
The narrative explores themes of obsession, ambition, and the collision between human will and the forces of nature, unfolding with Herzog’s characteristic intensity and visual grandeur.
The production itself became legendary for its difficulty. Herzog’s determination to film the central ship-over-mountain sequence without special effects—physically hauling a 320-ton vessel across land—contributed to a notoriously arduous shoot, widely regarded as one of the most challenging in cinematic history.
At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Herzog won the Best Director award, and the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or. It received generally positive critical reception and has often been described as “imperfect but transcendent.”
Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash
