Cinemania Spain features The Lost City of Z 

The Lost City of Z was featured in this month’s Cinemania magazine together with a review.

 

Translation via Bing

James Gray leaves the big city to explore the Amazon rainforest with Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson Looking for ‘ Z, the Lost City ‘

THE JUNGLE DOES NOT WANT YOU. He does not want you to bother among the vegetation and you step on where you should not. However, the exploratory spirit of the human being is insistent and will do everything possible to placate it. Another thing is that he manages to win the match. Percy Fawcett, an explorer of the early twentieth century, failed. Or maybe yes, more than anyone else. The fact is that, convinced of the existence of an ancient city lost in the unexplored jungle of the Amazon, disappeared looking for it. He was last seen in 1925, crossing the Xingu River.

The story of Fawcett’s expedition ended up being as fascinating as the very mystery of Z’s existence, as the British called the mythical ruined city it traced. For years, other explorers and ethnographers fueled rumors and fantastic legends about his whereabouts. In 2009, journalist David Grann told all this in a book, The Lost City of Z, which quickly became a bestseller. A year before, Brad Pitt and his awakened Plan B producers had already sent the galleries to James Gray. They wanted me to make a movie. “I did not understand why I, as nothing in my work before was related to the jungle,” says the New York filmmaker by telephone from Los Angeles. “But I soon saw the potential of history to explore ideas like obsession and class condition. At the movies I do not think it makes sense to always do the same things, so, scared to death, I accepted.”

“I wanted to tell Fawcett’s obsession by expressing all the personal cost it had for him,” explains Gray, who left the project on two occasions – half done The Immigrant 2013) – with changes in distribution until Charlie Hunnam ended up being the definitive Fawcett. A much greater challenge was to shoot in 35mm in the middle of the Colombian jungle. “The cameras ended up badly. I do not know how it is possible, but one grew a plant inside.” The jungle does not love you; Much less that you go to shoot movies to her.

Here’s the review

Translation via Bing

Percival Fawcett was a British Army officer who, makes a Century, during a series of expeditions in the Amazon, developed the inescapable conviction that the stories he had heard about an ancient city built of gold were true. His Odyssey, geographical and mental, is the subject of this devastating film, which on the one hand is an artifact of another epoch — its austere narrative, its paused rhythm and its visual majesty are pure classicism – but, on the other hand, it adopts an unprecedented approach in its attack on colonialism:  Its protagonist, after all, contemplates the tribes less from the fear or superiority than from the curiosity and respect.  As you travel again and again chasing your ghost, Percival establishes with nature a beautiful connection that endows to the film of a dream atmosphere – he doesn’t want to leave there, and neither did we. Slowly, between the mist and the foliage and the dense humidity begin to glimpse the spectra of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre and other unwary ones who, like him, looking for the limits of the jungle, they found their sanity.

Director James Gray turns that journey into a treaty, not only about all the poetry and all the pathology that the cravings for exploration and human obsession itself encloses, but also about the search for the meaning of life. In that sense, Z is a Praise of Man’s desire to be lost in his dreams, to live so deep and intensely as possible, of risking everything in looking for the sublime. As the best epic cinema, we delve into it unimaginable and gives it depth and context; And, in the process, what began as a simple story of adventure is winning in melancholy and ability to terrify and charm at once, to transform itself In something much more enigmatic, almost metaphysical. Nando Salvá

Verdict as he accompanies a man to search for his El Dorado, James Gray finds his own: possibly his best film.

Thanks Posh.