From Amazon to Amazon

How a Family Mystery Led Filmmaker Christina Rose to the Brazilian Rainforest

By Lena Basse

Every year, the Cannes Film Festival introduces me to dozens of filmmakers. Some arrive with Palme d'Or contenders, others with Oscar-winning careers already behind them.

Christina Rose arrived with neither.

We met at the Majestic Hotel, the unofficial home of movie stars during Cannes. She wasn't there because she had a film premiering on the Croisette or because photographers were waiting outside for her. At least not yet.

Instead, over coffee, we spent nearly two hours talking about the Amazon rainforest, forgotten women filmmakers, family history, depression, love, and how one unexpected discovery changed the direction of both her career and her life. By the time our conversation ended, I realized I hadn't simply met another independent filmmaker with a documentary in post-production. I had stumbled onto a real-life detective story.

Ironically, it all began with another Amazon.

Years before traveling to the Amazon rainforest, Christina and her brother founded their production company, MirrorWater Entertainment, and secured a development deal with Amazon Studios. It was the kind of opportunity every independent filmmaker hopes for.

Then the company underwent major executive changes following the MeToo movement.

"Our project wasn't officially canceled," Christina recalls. "It just vanished."

Looking back, she laughs at the coincidence. Losing one Amazon eventually led her to another.

Growing up between Germany and the United States in an American military family, Christina moved more than fifteen times before going to college. Constant relocation made lasting friendships difficult, but movies became her one stable companion.

"I never wanted to be an actress," she tells me. "I wanted to be behind the camera."

Following the advice of one of her professors, she first studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California earning her MFA in filmmaking from USC. She believed that great films begin with great stories, and literature was where she wanted to learn how to tell them.

Her career eventually took her back and forth between Los Angeles and Germany, developing television projects and producing documentaries. One of them, Empowered, followed women working in underrepresented professions around the world. Then came another unexpected interruption.

The pandemic halted production just as the series was nearing completion. At the same time, Christina made a deeply personal decision to stop traveling and stay home to care for her aging German Shepherd.

"If she had spent thirteen years taking care of me," she says, "it was my turn to take care of her."

For nearly two years, filmmaking took a back seat. When her dog passed away in late 2023, Christina found herself wondering what story she wanted to tell next.

The answer had been sitting in her own family for almost a century.

During the pandemic, Christina and her mother spoke almost every day. Growing up between Germany and the United States, Christina speaks English and German with equal ease, switching effortlessly from one language to the other. Yet her great-grand-aunt Pola Brückner's memoir presented an unexpected obstacle. Although written in German, it was penned in the old Gothic script (Kurrent), which can be difficult to read if you're not used to it, even for native German speakers.

So, her mother began reading the book aloud to her over Zoom, one chapter at a time. The memoir described a remarkable year-long expedition to the Brazilian Amazon in 1929.

"Wait," I interrupted. "Is it like the expedition in Embrace of the Serpent?"

Christina smiled.

"The one inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg?" she asked.

"Exactly," I replied. "It came over decade ago and I am still thinking about this black and white beautiful film."

We both laughed. It suddenly occurred to us that Germans seemed to have been remarkably fascinated by the Amazon at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Christina would later discover, Pola and August Brückner were far from the only Germans who ventured into the rainforest during that period. Explorers, ethnographers and filmmakers all saw the Amazon as one of the last great frontiers waiting to be documented.

For years, Christina had assumed that Pola simply accompanied her husband, filmmaker and cinematographer August Brückner, on the journey. Then one sentence made her stop.

"Wait… was she a filmmaker too?"

That single question turned into years of research. Christina began searching archives throughout Germany and Poland, hoping to learn more about her relative. The trail seemed to be running cold until someone suggested she contact German film historian Wolfgang Fuhrmann, an expert on German film expeditions. Instead of simply answering Christina's questions, he surprised her with one of his own.

There was someone else looking for Pola. On the other side of the Atlantic.

Brazilian anthropologist Elena Welper had independently begun researching Pola Brückner during the pandemic. Neither woman knew the other existed. Separated by an ocean, speaking different languages and working for entirely different reasons, they had unknowingly begun assembling the same historical puzzle.

"It felt almost impossible to believe," Christina says.

Soon another researcher, Brazilian film historian Rodrigo Campos, joined the effort. Researchers in Germany, Brazil and the United States began sharing archival documents, photographs and discoveries through a common Google Drive. What had started as family curiosity became an international investigation.

The more Christina learned, the more extraordinary Pola Brückner's story became.

In April 1929, Pola joined an expedition to the Brazilian Amazon together with August Brückner, photographer Arthur Heye, physician Edgar Eichhorn and law student Franz Eichhorn. Their goal was ambitious: to produce documentary films about the Amazon rainforest and its Indigenous communities.

Six months into the expedition, tragedy struck. August Brückner became seriously ill and later died in a hospital in Belém. After his death, three surviving members of the expedition published books describing what had happened. Curiously, each claimed to have taken over leadership of the mission.

"There are three versions of the same story," Christina says. "Everybody remembered themselves at the center."

Another discovery made the mystery even more intriguing. The expedition's documentary, Urwaldsymphonie (Jungle Symphony), premiered in Berlin in 1931. While searching the German Federal Archives, Christina came across a later version of the film released under a different title, Die Grüne Hölle. Comparing the archival registration cards revealed something remarkable. The original film credited August and Pola Brückner. The later version did not. But the original Urwaldsymphonie has never been found.

"If we're right," Christina says, "Pola may have been one of the first women ever to shoot a film in the Amazon. Yet today, almost nobody knows her name." And that realization changed Christina's documentary.

Originally, she planned to make a historical portrait of Pola Brückner. But as the research expanded, she realized there wasn't enough material to reconstruct Pola's entire life, while the Amazon expedition itself contained enough stories for an entire series. So, she made a bold decision.

She turned the camera toward herself. Instead of pretending to have all the answers, Christina invited viewers to join her search. The documentary became not only the story of Pola Brückner, but also the story of one filmmaker trying to understand another across nearly a century. Eventually, Christina knew the archives could take her only so far. She had to go to Brazil.

Working with the São Paulo production company Grifa Filmes, journalist Claudia Belfort, Elena Welper and a team of local historians and researchers, she retraced Pola's route through Belém, Marajó Island and the Amazon rainforest. She expected to find places described in the memoir. Instead, she found people who embraced the project as their own.

"Nobody helped because Pola was my relative," Christina says. "They helped because they believed this history belonged to them too." Local historians searched forgotten archives. Park rangers spent weeks locating places mentioned in Pola's book. Descendants of members of the original expedition opened family collections and shared memories that had never been part of any official archive.

"It became their story as much as mine," Christina says.

When I ask what the journey to Brazil meant personally, she doesn't hesitate.

"It saved my life."

She explains that years of struggling to finance films, watching projects disappear and questioning whether she was still on the right path had left her emotionally exhausted. Finding Pola gave her a new purpose.

"Maybe my purpose wasn't just making films," she says. "Maybe it was finding Pola."

Today, Christina's documentary The Lost Voice is in post-production, and her dream is to premiere it at the Berlin International Film Festival. Berlin is more than just another prestigious festival. It is the city where Pola Brückner lived, worked and where Urwaldsymphonie premiered nearly a century ago.

As we were talking about the film's future, Christina suddenly smiled: "You know how the Berlin Film Festival always starts on a Thursday?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Next year they're starting on Wednesday, February 10."

Then she paused.

"Pola was born on February 10, 1898."

I couldn't hide my excitement.

"So, I'm taking it as a sign."

Whether coincidence or not, it is a beautiful one. Nearly one hundred years after Pola Brückner set out for the Amazon with a camera, another filmmaker is hoping to bring her story back to Berlin.

As we leave the Majestic Hotel and step back into the familiar Cannes whirlwind of premieres, interviews and celebrities, photographers are still waiting outside for the next famous face to appear. Christina Rose walks past them unnoticed and it doesn't bother her, she is smiling. If her film succeeds, audiences won't simply discover a promising new filmmaker. They may also discover Pola Brückner: a pioneering woman whose contribution to cinema has remained hidden for nearly a century.

Looking back, it seems strangely fitting that Christina's journey began with Amazon Studios and eventually led her to the Amazon rainforest. One Amazon gave her an opportunity.

The other gave her a story worth telling.

About Lena Basse:

Lena Basse is a prominent international entertainment journalist, film critic, and Hollywood correspondent based in Southern California. She is a voting member of the Golden Globe Foundation and has built a distinguished career covering cinema, celebrity profiles, and arts for prominent Eastern European publications.