In 1985, eleven intrepid adventurers set off on an epic journey by kayak across the entire length of the Amazon river, from its source high up in the icy Andes to the Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles away. En route, they encountered terrorists, had several accidents in which participants nearly drowned, and team members both feuded with each other and fell in love.
It sounds like something out of a Joseph Conrad novel or one of Werner Herzog’s vainglorious adventure movies about explorers and conquistadors. The trip has already inspired a classic piece of travel journalism, participant Joe Kane’s ‘Running The Amazon,’ published in 1990. Now, it has spawned a new movie, The Current, from Polish director Rafał Skalski (and a world premiere this week in Millennium Docs Against Gravity).
The Current flows in some directions that may take viewers by surprise. Its tone is more humorous than portentous. “What is more unpredictable – nature or people?” is the question the director asks. Inevitably, it’s the human factor which most fascinates him most.
“You know, for several years now, I’ve been making mostly comedies,” the director confides, referring to his earlier movies like 2023’s The Stroke and 2025’s Sexy Laundry. Even when he has ventured into other genres, for instance true crime, he has never lost his knack for comic observation.
“I seek the humour in almost everything,” Skalski continues. His theory is that no-one’s life is “100% dark…and it’s not 100% light either.” That’s why he looks for shades and nuances, laughter and tears.
Skalski was born in 1985, the year of the expedition. A director friend recommended that he read the Joe Kane book. “What intrigued me most was that the foreground was dominated by what was happening between the people [on the trip], the emotions, conflicts and relationships,” he remembers. “When I read the book, I decided it was a great theme for documentary.”
Forty years on, most of the participants were happy to revisit their often very turbulent experiences travelling down the world’s biggest river. “I think that time had healed those wounds that they had.”
There is lingering animosity between two of the team members – the original South African leader of the trip, Francois Odendaal, and the hard-driving Piotr Chmielinski, who took over the expedition after it turned out that Odendaal didn’t know much about kayaking. It didn’t help either that Odendaal had gotten into arguments with several of his fellow team members.
Chmielinski, who nowadays works as an environmental engineer, is often referred to as the “godfather of the Amazon.” He also features in the 2020 documentary, Godspeed, Los Palacos, about young Poles who left their country during the Cold War to conquer “the wildest river in Mexico.” Several of them ended up staying in North America – and that, in a roundabout way, was how he ended up on the Amazon adventure.
Skalski interviewed both men separately. It took several years to persuade them both to participate. “I had to be really sensitive speaking to them,” the director recalls.
Another challenge in making the film was that the former team-members were all living in different parts of the world and weren’t always easy to track down. Dr Kate Durant, the sole female on the trip, is in the UK, Jerome Truran is in Canada, Chmielinski is in Washington and others are dotted far and wide.
Editing was also complex given the number of protagonists and many different story strands.
What made the expedition so unusual was that it was filmed at every stage. The documentary makers therefore didn’t need to rely on re-enactments, but had plenty of dramatic material of the kayakers paddling desperately as the river swirls around them.
“90% of our film is found footage,” Skalski notes.
Most of the footage was silent but, on the last day of editing, the director discovered two minutes which had sound.
“I was impressed,” the director says of this extensive 16mm material of the expedition which was filmed with heavy equipment but still captured the key moments of tension and peril in surprisingly graceful fashion.
The trip was made before anyone had iPhones or GoPro cameras. At times, the adventurers seemed very naive as they blithely crossed through war zones, or put themselves in harm’s way without even realising they were doing it.
“For me, this is the most important topic,” the director says. “The facts is that this expedition took place before GPS and smartphones…I have enormous respect for the people who conceived this idea and carried it out but, on the other hand, questions arise about the meaning of such expeditions, especially when we think about the parts of the world through which they are travelling. For the local communities, the people who’ve lived there for thousands of years, that river carries completely different significance.”
Cut to its essence, and this is a story about 11 white people travelling across lands where, arguably, they don’t have any right to be.
The Current [Nurt] was produced through Koi Studio with support of the Polish Film Institute. The project was pitched at Hot Docs in 2020. Now, other filmmakers are understood to be developing a fiction movie about the journey.
In Warsaw this weekend, some of the participants will be going back on the water in their kayaks, the highly competitive Chmielinski among them. Dr Durrant is also in town. As the documentary underlines, they’re likeable and often self-deprecating figures, prepared to laugh at their antics four decades ago.
“I like all of them. For me, it was some kind of learning experience. I am 40. When I started to work on the film in 2017, I was 32, the same age as they were when they made the expedition. I spent almost a decade on the documentary…somehow, I want to be like them when I am 60 or 70 because they are really active still.”
Having made his Amazon river doc, Skalski is in the middle of shooting his next project, an action-drama series for Sky Showtime (whose title he is not allowed to divulge). “This is, as well, a new experience for me…but there will still be some humorous parts in it. I try to find comedy everywhere!”
