In the fairytale, Hansel and Gretel dropped pebbles and breadcrumbs. Last year, a real-life sibling group, lost in the Colombian rainforest, left a trail behind them as they wandered missing for 40 days: nappies, a baby bottle, a dummy. The four brothers and sisters, aged between 11 months and 13 years old, had been travelling on a small plane that crashed over a remote part of the Amazon, killing the three adults on board – including their mother, a member of the Indigenous Huitoto people. The remarkable story of the search and rescue, and the children’s survival, is told in this Netflix documentary.
The fate of the missing children, swallowed up by the forest, gripped Colombia. Immediately after the plane came down, two search parties frantically began combing the area. The military’s effort, known as Operation Hope, involved a fine-tooth comb search by elite soldiers, with helicopters with megaphones playing a recording of the children’s grandmother telling them to stay put in one place and keep close to water. The second party was formed by Indigenous volunteers with a deep knowledge of the rainforest, who did not want anything to do with the military. The film-makers get incredible access to both sets of rescuers and the way these two mutually distrustful groups eventually joined forces is a valuable reminder about the power of coming together, even if the film itself offers slick dramatic recreations of the search that don’t entirely work.
