“I call it Z, and it is there”. So speaks Percy Fawcett, the bold protagonist of James Gray’s beautiful take on the life of the turn of the century soldier, turned cartographer and explorer. This film charts the remarkable journey – over a substantial portion of Fawcett’s life – into the uncharted Bolivian Amazon, and the hints of a lost civilization that, once discovered, consumed him in his quest to discover the evidence to definitively prove his hypothesis of its existence. It is a story about drive, obsession, family and the unquenchable thirst for discovery, moving across contrasting backdrops, from the British countryside, to London’s halls of power, and from First World War trenches into the captivating beauty and dense claustrophobia of the Amazonian rainforest.
Through The 4th Wall 