## Werner Herzog and the Return to the Site
Werner Herzog is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of world cinema, known for productions that operate at the edge of what is physically and psychologically possible — for *Aguirre, the Wrath of God* (1972), filmed on the Amazon with a notoriously difficult production; for *Fitzcarraldo* (1982), which involved actually hauling a steamship over a mountain; for documentaries that pursue their subjects into extreme and sometimes dangerous territory.
He had a specific relationship to LANSA Flight 508 that predated his documentary about Juliane by decades. In 1971, he was at Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport while scouting locations for a film — the same airport, in the same period, as the departure of Flight 508. His plans changed at the last minute, and he did not board that flight. He has said the near-miss stayed with him for years.
The documentary he made about Juliane Koepcke’s survival, *Wings of Hope*, was filmed in 1998 and released — depending on the source — in 1998 or 2000. It accompanied her on a return to the crash site: her first visit back to the location of the wreckage in seventeen years. She has described the return as a kind of therapy — that going back, with Herzog’s specific form of attentive and empathetic filmmaking as the context, helped her process something that had been unprocessed for two and a half decades.
The documentary is a more faithful account of her story than the 1974 Italian film *Miracles Still Happen* — a fictionalized and heavily dramatized version of the crash that Juliane has described as bearing limited relationship to what actually happened. Herzog’s version, told by Juliane herself in her own voice and on location, is primary-source documentation of her account rather than a dramatization of it.