A new documentary on Disney+ retraces the 2023 survival of four Colombian children who spent 40 days alone in the Amazon rainforest, placing the ordeal in a broader social and cultural context while drawing praise for its filmmaking.
Lost in the Jungle, co-directed by Oscar winners Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi with Juan Camilo Cruz, is the third documentary treatment of the story to reach streaming platforms following Netflix’s The Lost Children and HBO’s Lost in the Amazon: The Rescue That Shocked the World in 2024. The film runs 96 minutes and uses re-creations, soldiers’ bodycam footage, cellphone clips and animation to tell the account largely through the testimony of Lesly, the 13-year-old who guided her siblings through the rainforest after a private Cessna crashed on its way to Bogotá.
Lesly narrates waking to blood and pain beneath her mother’s body, finding her infant sister Cristin crying and her other siblings alive but injured. Magdalena, the children’s mother, and two adults on board the plane were killed in the crash. Lesly describes fashioning a bed of leaves and carrying out the daily work of keeping the group alive with limited food and water, while avoiding threats both animal and human.
The documentary foregrounds the role of local indigenous people in locating the crash site and sustaining the search. Colombian military special forces had triangulated a rough area of about 124 square miles but were cautious because the patch of jungle was territory where guerrilla groups have long operated. The indigenous searchers followed vultures and used machetes to move through dense brush; a shaman joined the effort and, as the search stretched into weeks, invoked traditional rituals and, by the film’s account, coca-based psychedelics and ayahuasca to sustain the searchers’ stamina and morale.
The film also portrays the uneasy cooperation between indigenous search parties and the military. In interviews included in the documentary, General Sanchez of Colombia’s special forces says the search felt like looking “for tiny, tiny fleas in an immense carpet that kept jumping and moving around.” A soldier recounts placing bottles of liquor in a specific area to distract a forest spirit known locally as a duende, describing the act as both deference to local belief and an act of desperation after weeks without leads.
Lost in the Jungle expands the narrative beyond survival to examine domestic and cultural dynamics. Family members and friends of Magdalena discuss a pattern of abuse by the children’s stepfather, Manuel, who is shown recruiting fellow indigenous people to join a separate search party after the military response began. The film does not speculate on why the children managed to survive; instead it juxtaposes Lesly’s practical accounts with the shaman’s interpretation that forces beyond the visible world may have played a role.
Critics have noted the directors’ visual and narrative choices. John Serba of Decider called the film “exquisitely crafted,” praising its use of animation to convey the children’s experience without showing their faces until the film’s end and its tight 96-minute structure that integrates multiple narrative strands. Serba compared the film’s craftsmanship to Chin and Vasarhelyi’s prior work on large-scale rescues, including The Rescue, which chronicled the 2018 Thai cave operation.
The documentary deliberately avoids offering a definitive causal explanation for the children’s survival, instead presenting competing frames — pragmatic, cultural and spiritual — and letting viewers consider their implications. It documents how long-standing mistrust between rural indigenous communities and state forces shaped both the search and the families’ responses.
Lost in the Jungle adds to a growing record of media treatments of the 2023 incident, and it has been received as a version that deepens context by emphasizing local knowledge, institutional failures and the legacy of regional conflict. The film is streaming on Disney+ and, according to reviews, will likely stand alongside earlier accounts as a significant cinematic interpretation of the event.