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.
It took two weeks to locate the wreckage of the plane; then, as days passed, rescuers began to question why the children hadn’t been found. Could it be they might be hiding from men in uniforms carrying guns? After all, Indigenous people had been the target of military atrocities during the country’s decades-long civil war. Family members also let it be known that the children might not want to be found by Manuel Ranoque, the biological father of the two youngest children and stepdad to the older two, who had been at the forefront of the search.
This is a horrible twist, and the film, with its clanging score, felt to me slightly tactless in its approach, like a Hollywood-ised version of a human interest story. But alongside the search parties, the hero of the story emerges as the oldest of the children, the amazing Lesly, who, with a badly injured leg, kept her siblings alive for over a month. It’s an extraordinary story.
• The Lost Children is on Netflix from 14 November
