Burden of DreamsBurden of Dreams

An extraordinary feature-length documentary about the messianic German director Werner Herzog struggling against desperate odds in the Amazon basin to make his epic feature, Fitzcarraldo. For nearly five years, Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, the story of one man's attempt to build an opera house deep in the Amazon jungle. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank captured the unfolding of this production, made more perilous by Herzog's determination to shoot the most daunting scenes without models or special effects, including a sequence requiring hundreds of native Indians 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.Burden of Dreams was honored with a British Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1982, and many critics consider it Blank’s most incredible film.  Winner of a **BAFTA** award.