{"id":113090,"date":"2025-09-02T01:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T01:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/113090\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T01:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T01:13:10","slug":"national-geographic-doc-from-free-solo-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/113090\/","title":{"rendered":"National Geographic Doc from Free Solo Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

In many respects, the 2023 Caquet\u00e1 Cessna Stationair crash feels like a story tailor-made for a National Geographic<\/a> documentary. It has everything you expect from a movie from the channel: human survival against the elements, plenty of nuanced political and cultural context to dig into, a heart-wrenching backstory to untangle slowly through the film<\/a>, and lots of breathtaking nature b-roll. <\/p>\n

The movie that NatGeo ended up producing about the event, \u201cLost in the Jungle<\/a>,\u201d is coming a bit late to the party \u2014 Netflix beat them to the punch by about a year with their telling \u201cThe Lost Children\u201d \u2014 and doesn\u2019t really register as a standout from the company\u2019s portfolio. But the subject matter is compelling enough, and the filmmaking sturdy enough, that it\u2019s an engrossing watch despite its minor flaws.<\/p>\n

\"NEW<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d was directed by the now-divorced husband and wife directorial team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, collaborating on this film with Juan Camilo Cruz. Vasarhelyi and Chin are no strangers to National Geographic, having helmed one of the company\u2019s biggest hits<\/a> in 2018\u2019s \u201cFree Solo,\u201d a adrenaline-pumped and gravity-defying account of one man\u2019s attempt to scale El Capitan. <\/p>\n

Compared to that Oscar-winning production or their other films like \u201cThe Rescue\u201d for NatGeo, \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d is a bit more meat-and-potatoes in its presentation, stringing together talking heads, darkly lit recreations, and some rare taken footage to recount the 40-day search from authorities to find four children gone missing in the forests of Colombia.<\/p>\n

Opening with a (somewhat sluggishly staged) reenactment of the inciting incident, \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d lays out the facts of the tragedy quickly. On May 1, 2023, indigenous Witoto woman Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia boarded a charter plane to the town of San Jos\u00e9 del Guaviare, where she intended to surprise her husband Manuel. In the air over the Amazon rainforest, the plane experienced engine failure, and crashed, killing her, the pilot, and local indigenous leader Herman Mendoza Hern\u00e1ndez. The only survivors were Magdalena\u2019s four children, ranging from ages 13 to infancy, who were left stranded and injured in the wilderness with no idea of how to escape. <\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Lost in the Jungle\u2019National Geographic<\/p>\n

For those unfamiliar with the incident, there\u2019s (perhaps thankfully) little tension that the kids will be found and rescued. Peppered throughout the film are sections narrated by the eldest daughter Lesly, recounting the animals and dangers the kids encountered during their long period stranded in the forest. In the film\u2019s only real visual flourish, these scenes are animated usually translucent, see-through animations set against b-roll of the real forest. It\u2019s not a wholly successful approach \u2014 it has an oddly distancing effect from the realities of their hopeless predicament \u2014 but attains moments of real visual beauty.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d does the groundwork to get you invested in the tragedy, and thankfully avoids treating Magdalena as a pure afterthought. Flashbacks and interviews with friends and family members slowly paints a portrait of a loving mother and a fun, vibrant woman, as well as the abuse she and her kids suffered at the hands of Manuel, the father of her two youngest and stepdad of Lesly and her brother Soleiny. Manuel himself is featured in interviews, and while the film gives him plenty of space to share his side of the story and his involvement in the rescue campaign, it also never lets his misdeeds off the hook \u2014 in one poignant moment, a family member speculates that the sound of their father\u2019s voice might compel the kids to hide from the rescue team.<\/p>\n

The real sauce of \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d comes from its documentation of the grueling search effort to find the kids, which in reality was two rescue missions: one from a Colombian Special Forces crew that descends upon the rainforest in helicopters looking for the kids, and one from the various indigenous communities of the area who use canoes to roam the rivers and their vast knowledge of the Amazon as a tool for searching. Initially encountering each other in their separate groups, the two parties are distrustful and disdainful of one another, and \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d uses this incident to explore a historical divide between the indigenous communities of the Amazon and the Colombian government that dates back to the rubber trade of the 19th century, which resulted in the enslavement and genocide of millions. In modern times, tension between the groups still exist, thanks to guerrilla units that control the territory of many indigenous groups.<\/p>\n

As the documentary depicts through footage of the rescue efforts, all of those outside tensions make the two rescue parties reluctant to work together, until the government orders the special forces team to use the indigenous search party\u2019s knowledge of the forest in their favor. Through interviews with members of the special forces team, \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d tracks how the military men slowly grew more open to and accepting of their very different counterparts, and how the group\u2019s collaboration eventually proved essential to the success of the mission. And to its credit, \u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d mostly manages to avoid the trap of portraying indigenous culture purely through the eyes of the white Colombians, giving them plenty of interviews to speak about the spiritual practices they used to aid in the search.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s any issue with \u201cLost in the Jungle,\u201d it might be that there\u2019s too little of it. At 90 minutes, the film is quick and efficient, but it leaves little time to explore more about the collaboration between these two search parties, or the unsteady relationship between the region\u2019s indigenous communities and the narco-guerrilla units ruling over them. The film ends on a note of hope, explaining where the children have ended up in the years since and culminating in footage of a Colombian official giving a speech about how the search should start a new phase of understanding between the government and the indigenous communities. It\u2019s a somewhat pat, overly rosy broad-strokes ending to a story that\u2019s certainly engaging and well-told, but also had the opportunity to go deeper than itself. <\/p>\n

Grade: B- <\/p>\n

\u201cLost in the Jungle\u201d premiered at the 2025 Telluride<\/a> Film Festival. It will air on National Geographic on Friday, September 12 before streaming on Hulu and Disney+ starting on Saturday, September 13. <\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here<\/a> to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014 all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In many respects, the 2023 Caquet\u00e1 Cessna Stationair crash feels like a story tailor-made for a National Geographic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,1554,63802,337,29978,60913],"class_list":{"0":"post-113090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-lost-in-the-jungle","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-national-geographic","15":"tag-telluride"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}