On Christmas Eve 1971, 17-year old Juliane Koepcke, survived a plane crash in the Peruvian rain forest. All 92 of the other passengers, including Koepcke’s mother, were killed. She remained in the jungle for eleven days, struggling to find food and potable water and keep her head on straight after such an emotionally devastating accident. In the end, she was reunited with her father, the famous zoologist Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke.
If you think Juliane’s story sounds like the perfect premise for a Werner Herzog documentary, you’re onto something. Unfortunately, what seems like the most coherent story Herzog has chosen for a film in the last ten years (other than Grizzly Man, perhaps) was produced as a made-for-TV movie for German television and thus Wings of Hope, Herzog’s account of Koepcke’s ordeal, which premiered in 1998, has not received a wide release to date. It’s only available in fragments on YouTube. I’m a little bitter at Herzog, just having watched The Wild Blue Yonder, a cheap mash-up of stock NASA footage and corny alien conspiracy monologues, but I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and rent Wings of Hope in a heartbeat.
Here’s an excerpt from Vice’s September interview with Koepcke.
Vice: OK, and then you woke up the next day on the jungle floor?
Koepkce: The next morning, actually. The crash was around 1:30 PM, and the next morning around nine I looked at my wristwatch. It was still intact and only stopped working later on. Then I realized I was on the ground and I knew right away what had happened. I had a serious concussion, so I couldn’t sit up. My eye was swollen. My glasses—which I’d had since I was 14 because I’m nearsighted—were gone. I was lying underneath my seat and I wasn’t strapped in anymore. I could see a bit of the forest but also a bit of the sky. I knew that I had survived a plane crash. The concussion and the shock only let me realize basic facts. I didn’t really think about myself. I was more concerned about where my mother was. That’s the first thing I remember. I had probably woken up and lost consciousness again a couple of times before that, due to the heavy concussion. I must have released myself from the seat because I was definitely strapped in when I fell. That’s what Werner Herzog reconstructed later on, too. We know I was attached to the seat, which must have turned and buffered the crash. Otherwise I wouldn’t have survived. I also know that I had crawled under the seat because it was raining. I used to dream about this. I dreamed that I was dirty and soaked and would only have to get up to take a shower. Then I have a tiny fragment of a memory, of pulling myself under that seat to protect myself from the rain. Then I thought, “I just have to get up,” and when I made up my mind to do that, I woke up.
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