Burden of Dreams captures legendary director Werner Herzog’s filming of his most ambitious film Fitzcarraldo, in which an entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski) endeavors to push a steamship over a mountain to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle, one thousand miles away from civilization.

Featuring visceral interviews with Herzog, Burden of Dreams which was held by Roger Ebert as “one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie” depicts the full range of Herzog’s unflinching vision spanning four years of production, despite all odds, such as the lead actor (Jason Robards) who had to leave the set after 40% of the shoot was completed and ultimately was replaced by Herzog’s muse, Klaus Kinski. Most notoriously, the film features a jaw-dropping sequence featuring Herzog requiring hundreds of native Campa, Machiguenga, and Aguaruna people 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.

Blank’s interviews with Herzog, bring context and backstory to his personalized style of “ethnographic filmmaking,” which values Peru’s native, Campa, Machiguenga, and Aguaruna people and their Old World culture as much as it does Herzog’s perilous enterprise. 

Blank’s appreciation for the jungle comes through in his uninflected photography of insects, birds, and even the feet and faces of his Peruvian subjects - as frequently set against the classical music that Herzog used in Fitzcarraldo.

Herzog was energized by the story of Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, an aspiring Peruvian rubber baron who forced hundreds of Amazonian natives to disassemble a steamboat and portage its pieces over an isthmus in the Madre de Dios Mountains. Once on the other side, the boat was reassembled so that Fitzcarraldo could transport the rubber down the Ucayali River to be sold. For his self-penned narrative, Herzog made his leading character an Irishman in love with opera — specifically with the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, for whom Fitzcarraldo aspires to build an opera house in the Iquitos jungle, where he plans for Caruso to perform someday. During the filming, Herzog’s leading actor Jason Robards came down with amoebic dysentery and was forced to abandon the film. Robards’s co-star Mick Jagger followed suit due to scheduling constraints. Herzog called in his reliably tempestuous muse Klaus Kinski to fill the role of Fitzcarraldo and scrapped Jagger’s sidekick character. Although Blank only visited Herzog’s remote shoot twice — for several weeks at a time — he and his editor/sound technician Maureen Gosling capture the full range of Herzog’s tribulations. Violent conflicts between hostile natives and the jungle’s chaos present Herzog and his multicultural skeleton crew with exotic challenges. For all of the attacks that Herzog endured from tribal factions, critics, and Mother Nature herself, the imperturbable director proves himself as much a man of the people as an uncompromising filmmaker.