Lost City of Z explores the hunt for a vanished civilization

Robert Pattinson (from left), Sienna Miller and Charlie Hunnam promote the movie The Lost City of Z at the 67th Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin on Feb 14. [Photo/Agencies]

British actors Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam star in the true-to-life jungle adventure story The Lost City of Z about the ill-fated search for a vanished South American civilization.

The movie, given its international premiere at the Berlin film festival on Tuesday, was directed by US filmmaker James Gray (The Immigrant) and is based on a bestseller by David Grann, a New Yorker staff writer.

Hunnam, best known from the Sons of Anarchy television series, plays Percy Fawcett, a British mapmaker and explorer who believed there was an advanced society in the Amazon long before the arrival of the Europeans.

Pattinson, the heartthrob from the Twilight franchise, is his aide-de-camp Henry Costin, who joined him on several treacherous expeditions before and after World War I looking for what Fawcett called The Lost City of Z.

Sienna Miller (Foxcatcher) appears as his wife Nina, an independent woman with a taste for adventure who longed to accompany Fawcett on his travels but stayed back in England to raise their three children.

The story plays up both the lengths to which Fawcett would go for recognition in Britain's rigid class system, as well as his progressive streak, with a desire to disprove Western notions of cultural superiority.