In her first documentary interview since here release in July 2008, Ingrid Betancourt takes French Television back to the nightmare of 2310 days and nights held hostage in the jungle by the FARC. In a truly remarkable interview she relives the stories of escape and betrayal, of love and hate, of terror and extraordinary courage. For years no one knew whether they were even alive and certainly not what life was like now there is a balanced dramatic account of those years. And of course the story culminates in one of the most dramatic rescues of modern history.
Ingrid Betancourt, 6 years in the Jungle takes the viewer back to the heart of the nightmare - along with her assistant, Clara Rojas, Colombian Senator Luis Eladio Perez and one of the American hostages, Marc Gonsalves. For years the outside world merely got brief glimpses of Ingrid and Clara, this film tells the full story of how they fell out after attempting to escape very early on. There is the astonishing story of Ingrids second escape attempt and the terrible punishment meted out by the FARC afterwards.
Ingrid and Clara both tell their versions of how they came to build up walls of silence which Ingrid says continues until today, how Ingrid kept on trying to escape, how Clara came to terms with her captors, even ending up having a child in the middle of the jungle. There is the scene when Clara announces that she is pregnant and the reaction of the male hostages, worried that the outside world would think it is them. Then they establish that the father was a FARC guard. The film even has an interview with Martin Sombra, the FARC Camp Commander who ran their lives for over a year, and presided over Clara labour, the ceasarean and the birth of her child, Emmanuel. As Luis Eladio recounts: Imagine the scene: one guerilla holding a torch, another waving the flies away, a third holding out the intestines and then one cuts the baby out. Marc recounts how, after the baby was taken away, Clara would sing to the jungle.
Other highlights include an account of how Ingrid save Luis Eladios life and her own arguments with fellow hostages: as she says: it is easier to forgive the guards than fellow hostages.
The stories are intercut with specially shot footage in the Colombian jungle and an astonishing range of archive images of the camps the prisoners were in, an interview with a FARC commander boasting of the capture just as the Colombian President is denouncing it on TV. There is also the endless campaign waged by Ingrids family and others to keep the hostages on the Governments agenda and the endless argument of whether to negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers.
And to cap the film, is the amazing footage of the rescue by 14 unarmed Colombian intelligence officers acting out their part as a humanitarian mission. Astonishingly brave given neither Ingrid or Marc believed for a moment that they were Europeans or Australians. They simply thought FARC was tricking them again. But now as quickly as I was taken hostage, I was released... muses Marc...while Ingrid remembers screaming....screaming six and half years of captivity.