You’re probably familiar with the incredible tale of the four Colombian children who managed to survive a plane crash and endured 40 days alone in the Amazon rainforest in 2023. Lost in the Jungle, now available on Disney+, is the third documentary capturing this event, streaming across different platforms. In 2024, Netflix released The Lost Children and HBO presented Lost in the Amazon: The Rescue That Shocked the World. However, Lost in the Jungle may have the most distinguished filmmakers, co-directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who earned an Oscar for their 2019 documentary Free Solo and directed the praised biopic Nyad in 2023. They teamed up with Juan Camilo Cruz (Country of Lost Children) to deliver an artistic retelling of not just a survival story, but one that explores cultural tensions and domestic issues, adding layers to an already well-known tale.

The Gist: Lesly was 13 when she boarded a Cessna aircraft headed for Bogota, accompanied by her mother and siblings. In a solemn narration, she explains how they were going to live with her stepfather; she was content living with her grandmother and did not wish to leave. Her mother, Magdalena, was 33; her sister Soleiny, nine; brother Tien, five; and little sister Cristin, just 11 months old. Shortly into their journey, the plane experienced technical issues, and the pilot lost control. Lesly regained consciousness with a bleeding head and an aching leg to find Cristin crying under their mother’s lifeless body. The pilot and another adult passenger were also deceased. Soleiny and Tien survived. Lesly gathered her siblings, making a bed of leaves for them. “So much blood,” she reflects. “So much pain.” We see animated, pencil-like sketches of the frightened children traversing static images of the vast Amazon. They are utterly isolated.

This part of the jungle is extraordinarily dangerous, almost untouched by humans. It houses venomous snakes and large predators. However, the risk of getting lost in this wilderness is greater than any animal threat. It’s also where the Colombian military’s special forces have battled outlaw guerrilla groups for years. These guerrillas are involved in drug and human trafficking, exerting harsh control over indigenous people nearby. When the military narrowed down the plane’s location to a 124-square-mile zone, their well-armed, beret-clad soldiers cautiously searched the brush, wary of conflict. We are introduced to Manuel, the stepfather of Lesly and Soleiny, and father to Tien and Cristin. He shares his fear, anxiety, and heartbreak upon learning of the crash. Manuel recounts how he rallied the indigenous community he and Magdalena belonged to in order to start their own search effort. While the soldiers have technology and government aid, no one knows the jungle like the indigenous people do.

The indigenous also likely have familiarity on their side; conflict between guerrillas and soldiers taught indigenous children to fear soldiers with guns. Lesly shares how she heard music and sounds – the special forces recorded her grandmother giving them instructions to stay in one place, and blasted it through the rainforest, but she didn’t trust it, and kept moving, the children surviving on milpes fruit, and the baby, carried everywhere by Liesly, drank water via one salvaged baby bottle. It was the indigenous who first found the crash site – they knew to follow the vultures because they feast on carrion. The soldiers lined the area with yellow police tape strung with whistles, and dropped packages of food. Meanwhile, the indigenous work through the brush with machetes and call in their shaman, who speaks of dealing with treacherous forest spirits, and brings coca-based psychedelics to fuel the men on their search. As the search stretches beyond 20, 25, 30 days, the shaman has to bust out the ayahuasca, the last resort.

After overcoming initial tensions, the indigenous and the special forces set aside their differences so they can search together – the military men are ordered to follow the indigenous’ lead, after doing background checks to assure no guerrillas are among them. Lesly narrates the kids’ growing desperation and hunger, and meditates sadly on the loss of her mother. Magdalena’s friends, siblings and mother share the despair and fear they felt. They also outline a story of familial strife as Magdalena kept returning to Manuel despite the fact that he routinely beat her and pulled Lesly out of school to take care of the baby and cook for them; once he wielded a machete at Magdalena, prompting Lesly to flee with her siblings and spend the night in the jungle. It’s a terrible irony, how Manuel’s abuse may have prepared Lesly for survival in such a harsh environment for 40 long, impossible days.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Chin and Vasarhelyi directed a similarly harrowing, finely constructed survival documentary, The Rescue, about the multinational operation that saved a dozen boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. (No surprise, that story also produced rival documentaries, as well as a superbly directed Ron Howard drama, Thirteen Lives.)

Performance Worth Watching: Outside Lesly’s brave recollection of traumatic events, the shaman, Jose Rubio, is the most fascinating and charismatic character among the talking heads.

Memorable Dialogue: General Sanchez of the special forces: “We weren’t looking for a needle in a haystack. We were looking for tiny, tiny fleas in an immense carpet that kept jumping and moving around, leaving us guessing what their next move might be.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Lost in the Jungle is an exquisitely crafted documentary, a densely packed 96 minutes tightly braiding together the narratives of Lesly, the rescuers and Magdalena’s family and friends. Chin, Cruz and Vasarhelyi smoothly integrate a variety of visual means to tell the story – re-creations, soldiers’ bodycam footage, cellphone footage, current-day interviews. The directors’ most creative decision was to channel the emotional potency of the children’s experience – by its nature the least detailed, most impressionistic narrative thread – through evocative animations, which effectively represent their ordeal without directly invoking the horror of watching children suffer. Wisely, the film withholds images of the actual children; we don’t see their faces or gaunt, hunger-stricken bodies until the very end of the film.

Certainly, Lesly’s efforts to keep her siblings alive are inspiring and deeply moving. But the most fascinating, complex component is the juxtaposition of Colombia’s rural and urban cultures, represented by the indigenous and the military. There’s mutual distrust between them dating back decades to the rubber trade, when the government exacted slavery and genocide against the native peoples. It’s heartening to see them work together – essentially by order of the government, which had long neglected the indigenous people, and wisely chose to offer a diplomatic olive branch by trusting them and following their lead for the search. But that also presented a challenge for pragmatic soldiers who were asked by the shaman to account for the possibility of forest spirits keeping the children away from them; one soldier interviewed shares a story of placing full bottles of liquor in a specific area to distract the “duende” spirit from interfering with the search, and he frames it partly as an act of trust, but, after more than a month of fruitless searching, mostly as an act of desperation. “I’m not in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale,” he says, “but hey, anything to find the kids.”

Also wisely, Lost in the Jungle doesn’t hazard a guess as to how and why Lesly and her siblings defied the odds stacked against them. Those of us steeped in a culture of straight lines and rigid structure might insist on a logical explanation, while the indigenous might say that forces beyond our comprehension protected them. The film lets us wrestle with those possibilities, instead focusing on deepening the context of a story that becomes about much more than simple survival in a harsh environment. There’s more to maintaining the human spirit than food, air and water, and whatever that is lingers in the margins of the story, manifesting in the eye of the beholder. 

Our Call: Lost in the Jungle may be the definitive telling of this saga. It’s a superb documentary, and surely among the year’s best. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.