'Lost in the Jungle' National Geographic Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Real-life drama doesn't get much more harrowing, or much more inspiring, than the story at the heart of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Juan Camilo Cruz's new documentary Lost in the Jungle, which showed at Telluride ahead of its September premiere on National Geographic. In 2023, Indigenous Colombian Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy (aged 13 at the time) and siblings Soleiny (9 at the time), Tien (5) and Cristin (under a year) were on a plane headed to Bogota. It crashed somewhere in the Amazon, killing their mother and two other passengers, but the kids were OK. Relatively. Related Stories Movies Telluride: 'Jay Kelly' Team on Clooney and Stardom, Sandler's Soulful Turn and Crudup's Crazy Scene Movies 'This Is Not a Drill' Review: Climate Activism Doc Feels Stuck in a More Hopeful Past Lost in the Jungle The Bottom Line The story is more compelling than the way it's told. Venue: Telluride Film FestivalAirdate: 9 p.m. Friday, September 12 (National Geographic)Directors: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Juan Camilo Cruz 1 hour 36 minutes The Colombian military sent a unit of commandos into the jungle, while regional tribes sent their own search party, all certain that even if the children hadn't died in the crash, they would be unable to last for very long on their own. Forty days later, Lesly and her siblings were found, alive. How had they survived? How did the two very different groups of men, their relations instantly tense from decades of hostilities and colonialist trauma, manage to work together toward a common goal? It's an adventure and a nightmare that may sound familiar because it made international headlines just two years ago. Or it may sound familiar because last winter, Netflix debuted The Lost Children, Orlando von Einsiedel's feature-length documentary on the subject. Oscar winners Vasarhelyi and Chin (Free Solo) aren't strangers to finding themselves in a race to chronicle an already exhaustively reported tale of heroism and youthful bravery. It's only been four years since Vasarhelyi and Chin's The Rescue followed an identical Telluride-to-National-Geographic pipeline. The Rescue was neither the first nor last depiction of the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue and, in failing to find any particularly distinctive way to approach the subject, emerged as a recounting and not the recounting. I'd never tell anybody not to watch The Rescue. It's a good movie. Nor would I tell anybody that it was essential viewing. The definitive version of the search for Lesly and her brothers and sister has yet to be made. Like The Rescue, Lost in the Jungle is a solid documentary, but like The Lost Children ... well, it's just a lot like The Lost Children. It relies on the same chronological approach and same series of stories as the previous documentary, interviewing a large percentage of the same people from both search parties, stitching together a lot of the same on-the-ground footage from those rescue parties, and even similarly depicting the experiences of the children through whimsical animation. Not everybody will have watched that Netflix documentary, obviously, and I think that if you missed it, you might as well wait a couple of weeks to watch Lost in the Jungle, though it benefits more from extra time than anything artistic. The extra time gives a clearer post-rescue perspective on the kids' father Manuel Miller, who participates in Lost in the Jungle, exhibiting an impressive lack of self-awareness. His interviews presumably came before the legal situation that the Lost Children filmmakers probably wish they could update. I know that's confusing, but I've already spoiled that the kids live. I'm not going to spoil everything. That the kids participated in Lost in the Jungle is perhaps the new film's biggest selling point. It's primarily Lesly, who narrates her side of the story, given an appropriately folkloric dreaminess by the animation overlaid on footage of the jungle. She turns it into almost a children's story because, well, it's a child's story, which raises perhaps my biggest concern about Lesly's involvement: It's good to take pains to approach a minor and her memories of a traumatic event recorded for a piece of popular entertainment in the most ethical way humanly possible, but is there ever a truly ethical way of doing that? I'm not convinced the directors did anything wrong, but I'm even less convinced that there's a satisfying enough dramatic payoff to justify what they did. Lesly has the limited and fragmented memories of a child, and after watching multiple documentaries and a bunch of news reports on this story, I'm afraid I still don't understand how the kids survived in the jungle, especially the baby. Without conc