Don't Be So Political: FITZCARRALDO (1982)

Name: Don't Be So Political: FITZCARRALDO (1982)
Start: 2026-04-12T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Revue Cinema

Schedule

Sun, 12 Apr, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Revue Cinema | Toronto, ON

Don’t Be So Political is a monthly film series that engages with films through a political lens. Each screening is preceded by an expert Q&A. Hosted by Zach Wortzman

“It’s only dreamers who move mountains.”

A robber baron dreams of building an opera house in the jungle. To finance his opera, he must begin a rubber tapping business in an explored region of the jungle and pull a steamship over a mountain.

Director Werner Herzog embodies his character as the only person crazy and irresponsible enough to attempt to pull a steamship over a mountain in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest solely for the sake of art. The production became the subject of Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams that plays as a meta rehashing of the unbelievable challenges of achieving Fitzcarraldo’s dream. The feat won Herzog Best Director at Cannes and the film remains controversial in terms of its exploitation in its making. A true spectacle about the crazed drive of a man who will stop at nothing to see his dreams realized, Fitzcarraldo is a film that is guilty of that which it condemns.

Fitzcarraldo examines the resource curse, the rot of colonial extraction economies, the immeasurable cost of ambition and commerce and the destruction of nature and it does so by doing all of those things through the course of its production. Equal parts madness and muck, anyone who sees the film will understand how Herzog came to answer the question of whether a film could do harm, whether it could destroy a person, “In my heart the answer was yes. But I said no.” At the cost of four years of production, countless injuries, a severed foot, the breakout of a war, several on set deaths, Fitzcarraldo is a film that should not exist, and yet… (ZACH WORTZMAN)