Walter Saxer | |
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Born | 1947 (age 76–77) |
Nationality | Swiss |
Occupations |
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Notable work | Fitzcarraldo Sepa: Nuestro Señor de los milagros (1987) |
Walter Saxer (born 1947) is a Swiss film producer, production manager, screenwriter, and film director, born in 1947 in St. Gallen.
At the age of 20, Walter Saxer met Werner Herzog and became a unit production manager in Herzog's debut Even Dwarfs Started Small . [1] A long-time collaborator, in the following years Saxer produced Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Stroszek (1977), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). [2] Saxer's credits as producer include more than 22 films, he also wrote the script of the Scream of Stone . [3] His most known project is Fitzcarraldo , a film that is considered one of the most difficult productions in the history of cinema. [4] [2]
Saxer's sole work as director is a 1987 documentary Sepa: Nuestro Señor de los milagros. The film tells the story of Sepa, an experimental open-air penal prison established in 1951 by the Peruvian government as part of a programme to colonize the Amazon. The colony was situated on a 37,000 ha territory in the wild Peruvian jungle where the convicted had to establish their settlement and survive on their own. Referred to as ‘green hell’ by former inhabitants, in Sepa the prisoners were allowed to be joined by their families and were often on good terms with the guardians. Sepa was shut down in the early 1990s and left almost no traces, Saxer's film became the sole audiovisual evidence of its existence. [5] [6] The story is narrated by Mario Vargas Llosa. The film was shown only once on Swiss TV in the 1980s. [7] Decades later, the restored version of Sepa: Nuestro Señor de los milagros premiered in Spain during the 2021 Play-Doc film festival in Tui, Galicia. [2] [8]
In the mid 90's Saxer moved to the city of Iquitos, where he dedicated himself to managing a small hotel called La Casa Fitzcarraldo. [9] [10]
Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a 1972 epic historical drama film produced, written and directed by Werner Herzog. Klaus Kinski stars in the title role of Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in South America in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. The accompanying soundtrack was composed and performed by kosmische musik band Popol Vuh. The film is an international co-production between West Germany and Mexico.
Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 West German epic adventure-drama film written, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog, and starring Klaus Kinski as would-be rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an Irishman known in Peru as Fitzcarraldo, who is determined to transport a steamship over the Andes mountains to access a rich rubber territory in the Amazon basin. The character was inspired by Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, who once transported a disassembled steamboat over the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald.
Madre de Dios is a department and region in southeastern Peru, bordering Brazil, Bolivia and the Peruvian departments of Puno, Cusco and Ucayali, in the Amazon Basin. Its capital is the city of Puerto Maldonado. It is also the third largest department in Peru, after Ucayali and Loreto. However, it is also the least densely populated department in Peru, as well as its least populous department. It has one of the lowest poverty rates in Peru.
My Best Fiend is a 1999 German documentary film written and directed by Werner Herzog, about his tumultuous yet productive relationship with German actor Klaus Kinski. It was released on DVD in 2000 by Anchor Bay.
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a short documentary film directed by Les Blank in 1980, that depicts director Werner Herzog living up to his alleged vow to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed the film Gates of Heaven.
Burden of Dreams is a 1982 documentary film directed by Les Blank.
The Amazon Theatre is an opera house located in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. It is the location of the annual Festival Amazonas de Ópera and the home of the Amazonas Philharmonic Orchestra which regularly rehearses and performs at the Amazon Theatre along with choirs, musical concerts and other performances.
The Pongo de Mainique is a water gap (canyon) of the Urubamba River in Peru. Inside the water gap, the river is constricted to a width of 45 metres (50 yd). The Pongo de Mainique is 3 kilometres (2 mi) long. The elevation of the river is approximately 450 metres (1,480 ft). The steep cliffs on each side of the river rise sharply to mountains with elevations of more than 1,200 metres (3,900 ft).
LANSA Flight 508 was a Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop operated as a scheduled domestic passenger flight by Lineas Aéreas Nacionales Sociedad Anonima that crashed in a thunderstorm en route from Lima to Pucallpa in Peru on 24 December 1971, killing 91 people – all six crew on board and 85 of its 86 passengers. It is the deadliest lightning strike disaster in aviation history.
Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke /Joo-lia-nay, KOP-kay/, also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German-Peruvian mammalogist who specialises in bats. The daughter of German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, she became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest until she was rescued by local lumberjacks after finding their camp.
Wings of Hope is a 1998 made-for-TV documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film explores the story of Juliane Koepcke, a German Peruvian woman who was the sole survivor of Peruvian flight LANSA Flight 508 following its mid-air disintegration after a lightning strike in 1971. Herzog was inspired to make this film since he had narrowly avoided taking the same flight while he was location scouting for Aguirre, the Wrath of God; his reservation had been canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.
'Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus' is a German film editor who was a member of the New German Cinema movement and is noted particularly for her many films with director Werner Herzog. Between 1966 and 1986, she was credited on more than twenty-five feature films and feature-length documentaries.
Scream of Stone is a 1991 film directed by Werner Herzog about a climbing expedition on Cerro Torre. The film was shot on location at Cerro Torre, with several scenes filmed close to the summit.
The cinema of Iquitos, also known as Amazonian cinema, is an important film development and one of the historic pioneering event of cinema of Peru. Due to the rubber boom and the arrival of foreigners, film interest began in the early 20th century, along with the evolution of cinema of the United States in Hollywood. Cinema in Iquitos had no established date of origin. The first film, however, was made in 1900. The first films were shown in the Casa de Fierro with an Edison machine, which reproduced the images using a carbide lamp and the constant movement of the operator. Iquitos is mentioned as a metonym of cinema in the Peruvian Amazon.
The Fitzcarrald Isthmus is an 11 km long land bridge that connected important rubber trade routes of the Urubamba River and the Madre de Dios River in Peru.
Erik Nelson is an American documentary film director and television producer. Nelson has produced and directed several films, television specials and television programs such as Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Mega Disasters, When Good Times Go Bad, What Were You Thinking?, Unsolved History, Prehistoric Predators and More than Human.
Maureen Gosling is an American documentary filmmaker, editor, and director. She is best known for her 20-year collaboration with the late director Les Blank.
Gloria del Pacífico is a 2014 Peruvian epic war historical drama film written, directed and produced by Juan Carlos Oganes as his twelfth film. Starring Reynaldo Arenas, Carlos Vertiz, Gustavo Mac Lennan, Lilian Nieto, Pold Gastello, Juan Manuel Ochoa and Paloma Yerovi. It is the first part of a trilogy that will relate what happened during the War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile, which occurred in 1879 and 1883. The film premiered on November 6, 2014, in Peruvian theaters.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo is a 2004 book by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. It is Herzog's diaries from the troubled, three years long production of the 1982 film Fitzcarraldo.