In 16th century South America, a group of Spanish conquistadors descend the Amazon River in search of El Dorado, the legendary "City of Gold". As the expedition party falls foul of the local Indians and suffers disease and hunger it slowly falls apart. The megalomaniac second-in-command Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski) seizes control.

Described as "one of the best river films", Herzog's Amazonian epic charts the descent into disillusionment, despair and self-destruction of the group seeking the ever-elusive city and the riches it promises.

This is cinema of primal savagery, as much in its aesthetic minimalism of hand-held cameras aboard lurching rafts, as for its portrayal of civilization succumbing to murderous atavism, at the center of which is the explosive, gargoyle-like presence of Klaus Kinski as the messianic adventurer, Don Lope de Aguirre.

Herzog's insistent concentration on the power of place - the river, its swamps and forests - and the emphasis on filth, disease and brutality produce an environment of unforgiving cruelty in which he grounds the film's allegory of the human capacity for self-destruction.