Burden of Dreams

Burden of Dreams, the Les Blank-directed documentary that offers a wildly entertaining behind-the-scenes portrait of the making of Werner Herzog’s ambitious epic Fitzcarraldo, is now available to screen in a beautiful 4K restoration.

For nearly five years, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog desperately tried to complete one of the most ambitious and difficult films of his career, Fitzcarraldo, 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 indigenous Peruvians 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.

One-off screening Tuesday 2^nd September at Luna Leederville