For World Children’s Day: “The Lost Children”

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

November 20 is World Children’s Day (the one sponsored by the United Nations, that is. There is another annual celebration of the same name, normally held in May or June and that one seems to belong to the Pope). It seemed like an appropriate day to post about a new documentary that just went up on Netflix called The Lost Children.

I confess that my motives weren’t pure in checking this movie out. I saw that it was about a plane crash, and I am drawn to such stories. I have entire sections on this blog devoted to Disaster Movies, Maritime and Aerial Disasters, and Natural Disasters. The film wasn’t very much about the crash, however, it turns out. And I was perfectly okay with that.

This is a ripped-from-the-headlines story, though I had not seen the headlines. The event has been dubbed the 2023 Caquetá Cessna Stationair Crash. On May 1 of last year, a small plane went down in the Columbian Amazon carrying the pilot and six passengers, all members of the Witoto indigenous tribe. The plane hit the ground vertically, nose first. The pilot and a tribal leader, sitting up front, were killed instantly. The immediate survivors were a mother and her four children, aged 13, 11, 4 and 1. The mother died of her injuries four days later, leaving the children to fend for themselves.

If you’re the kind of person who gets pissed off about spoilers, you’re too late. Also, use your head. No one in their right mind would make a movie about four dead children. These kids, using survival skills they had learned at the hands of their elders, managed to live in the rainforest, on their own, for an astounding 40 days, living on a diet of fruit and seeds, roots and some other plant matter, and some flour that had been on the plane. They seem not to have gotten any protein, and they were severely malnourished and dehydrated when found. But it’s also remarkable that they avoided predators, natural toxins, and injuries during the entire time as well. These were kids who knew the environment and how to respect it.

Now–that story was what I thought I was signing on for. Some sort of mix of Five Came Back, Flight of the Phoenix, and Lord of the Flies. But the kids are scarcely in the story at all. This Columbian-made film, with direction credited to Orlando von Einsiedel, Jorge Duran, and Lali Houghton, is mostly about the rescue effort, which was remarkable for its rare collaboration between indigenious volunteers and the “white” Columbian military, both factions of which have traditionally mistrusted each other for good reason. (I put the word “white” in quotes for reasons having to do with Columbian culture as opposed to my own characterization. The indigenious people (about 5% of the Columbian population) regard the majority community as white, though in reality that 85% of the population is mestizo, an interracial mixture. (The Spanish interbred with the native population enthusiastically in the Americas. By contrast, in British America, there was very little of that, relatively speaking. Though seemingly oppositional, both outcomes are expressions of racism.)

For 40 days, hundreds of people combed the area around the crash site, accompanied by film-makers and journalists who recorded the process. The bulk of this film consists of footage of the actual search, combined with interviews, and some occasional use of re-enactments, a doleful practice which is the last thing anyone needs in this truth-deprived climate, though it has become common. We see contrasts in how the two factions conduct their searches. The military breaks the area into grids, and spread out personnel, looking for clues to follow. The natives are more attuned to the enviroment, can see better in the dense, chaotic underground, and rely more on intuition (aided at times by hallucinogens). The scale of the challenge is best attested to by the fact that it took the searchers so long to find the children, who had only wandered about four miles away. I am reminded of those Werner Herzog quotes in Burden of Dreams, about the “obscenity” of the jungle, all the chaos, and mess, and disorder, and the overwhelming scale of it. Someone can be standing two feet away and you can’t see them.

But the search party kept at it, bewildered initially to find an empty plane with only three corpses, then subsequently startled to find discarded items like diapers, a baby bottle, and so forth leading them farther and farther away. When they finally caught up with the kids, they looked like skeletons. The oldest sister, the real hero of the story, made sure that the baby, the weakest, got the most nutrition. The next most vulnerable, a four year old boy, was on the verge of death by the end of their ordeal.

As I say, the children’s survival story is itself inspirational, and maybe someday someone will tell it. But equally inspiring (to me) is the lesson the movie transmits about what it takes to bind people together. At present, the U.S. is at a tipping point where we will soon have a social dichotomy (probably a violent one) of the type we have always associated with the countries of Latin America. Yet we see quite clearly what it would take to reintegrate the seemingly irreconcilable sides: a challenge so great that the factions will HAVE to unite if only to solve a single problem. In this case, it was finding lost children. Believe me, I have no use for Fascists, and they surely have no love for someone like me. But when it’s time to sandbag the riverbank and the water is rising, no one wastes words on conversation. I think we’ve learned by now that 99% of the time, we’re better off not knowing what the people around us think. On the other hand, rescuing children, no one can argue with that. Sadly, in a couple of months there may be more lost children coming out of America than anyone will be able to find.