Jungle Child

Big entertainment cinema based on the eponymous bestseller by Sabine Kügler, who moved to the jungles of Papua New Guinea with her parents when she was just 5 years old, and lived there until she was 17, growing up among the natives of the Fayu tribe under archaic conditions. Directed by Roland Suso Richter, it stars Nadja Uhl and Thomas Kretschmann.    

Sabine Kuegler’s life has been a series of experiences that may seem unimaginable to the rest of us. The daughter of German linguistic researchers and missionaries, she grew up in the jungle of Western New Guinea. The story of Jungle Child starts when, at the age of five, Sabine arrives in Western New Guinea. In 1980, the Kueglers essentially took their three children back to the Stone Age. A helicopter without doors flew them over the rain forest. Sabine thought she was in heaven. She grew up with the natives of the Fayu tribe, ate grilled insects and raw worms, hunted monkeys and wild boar, saw snakes and crocodiles in the river, and built tree houses in the rain forest. Her father, in an outboard-powered dugout canoe, ventured into territories no white man had ever entered before, and her mother, a nurse, helped to raise a crippled orphan.