Cinema paradiso
Amelie
Loads of Russian animation films.
Das Boot
Fitzcarraldo - written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinsky.
The one about the opera guy dragging a boat across Peru. They nearly killed each other before the filming was finished !!
[edit] Story
Brian "Fitzcarraldo" Fitzgerald, a European living in a small city in
Peru in the early part of the 20th century, has a great love of opera and an indomitable spirit. He is a great fan of the famous tenor
Enrico Caruso and he dreams of building an
opera house in his city of
Iquitos. This will require a lot of money, and the most profitable industry in Peru at the time is
rubber. The areas known to contain
rubber trees have been parceled up by the Peruvian government and can be leased for exploitation.
Fitzcarraldo investigates getting into the rubber business. He is shown a map by a helpful rubber baron, who points out the only remaining unclaimed parcel in the area. He explains why no one has yet claimed the parcel: while it straddles the
Ucayali River, the parcel is cut off from the Amazon by a treacherous set of
rapids. However, Fitzcarraldo notices that the
Pachitea River, another Amazon tributary, comes within several hundred meters to the Ucayali upstream of the parcel.
[1]
To make his dream a reality, he leases the inaccessible parcel from the government. With the selfless underwriting of his paramour and brothel owner, Molly (
Claudia Cardinale), he buys a
steamer (which he
christens the
Molly Aida) from the same rubber baron, raises a crew and sets off up the Pachitea, the parallel river. This river is known to be more dangerous the further one gets from the Amazon because of the unfriendly tribes that inhabit the area. Fitzcarraldo's plan is to reach the point where the two rivers nearly meet and then, with the manpower of enlisted natives, physically pull his three-story, 320-ton steamer over the muddy 40° hillside across an isthmus, from one river to the next.
[2] Using the steamer, he will then collect rubber on the upper Ucayali and bring it down the Pachitea to market.
The 1982 book
Fitzcarraldo: The Original Story from Fjord Press (
ISBN 0-940242-04-4) reproduces Herzog's first version of the story before the screenplay was written.
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