Werner Herzog · 1982 · river

Werner Herzog's 1982 film. Obsessed with building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle town of Iquitos, the dreamer Fitzcarraldo sets out up an uncharted Amazon tributary to claim a fortune in rubber. To reach it he must do the impossible - haul a three-hundred-ton steamship over a mountain from one river to the next, with the help of the very indigenous people the venture endangers.

1. 1
   Iquitos

   The rubber-boom city deep in the Peruvian Amazon where the opera-mad Fitzcarraldo hatches his scheme to finance a grand theater by exploiting an unreachable stand of rubber trees.

2. 2
   The Ucayali

   The river up which he steams into unmapped territory, past rapids and the drums of unseen tribes, toward the neck of land that separates two great river systems.

3. 3
   The mountain

   The forested ridge over which Fitzcarraldo, with hundreds of indigenous laborers, drags his entire steamship on log rollers - the mad, monumental feat at the heart of the film.