(USA, 2008, 100 mins)

HDCam

Executive Producers: Olivia Newton-John Easterling, John Easterling, Micky Cottrell
Producers: Maria Florio, Molly Lynch, John Maringouin, Kevin Ragsdale, Roger M. Mayer
Cinematographer: John Maringouin
Editors: John Maringouin, Molly Lynch
Featuring: Martin Strel, Borut Strel, Matthew Mohlke

This hallucinatory odyssey follows a middle-aged, pot-bellied, hard-drinking Slovenian—the endurance swimmer Martin Strel—stroke by stroke into the heart of darkness as he attempts to swim the long and perilous Amazon River. The film plays like a mash up of a Werner Herzog epic and a Saturday Night Live skit starting from Strel’s preparations which include everything from power breathing to spending time in a cave in order to think like an animal. Once the trip begins, the relentless sun, daily exposure to innumerable parasites, and Strel’s unadjusted alcohol consumption begin to take their physical and mental toll.

Maringouin, who captured his father’s corrosive marriage in Running Stumbled, has a gift for evoking hellish situations and mental turmoil on screen. Here, he uses expressionistic sound, camerawork, and editing to make something mysterious, monumental, but still a little bit absurd out of Strel’s deteriorating psychological state. Many of the film’s peculiarities strain belief: The horseburgers? The puppet-wielding Brazilin priest? You may not be convinced of the veracity of each detail, but you will likely be very happy to be along on the journey.