Mountains of the Moon

Mountains of the Moon (1990) is a British-American historical adventure you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Bob Rafelson from William Harrison's novel Burton and Speke, it stars Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen as two men sent on the same impossible mission.

In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society dispatched Captain Richard Francis Burton and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke into equatorial Africa to locate the source of the Nile — a puzzle that had gone unanswered since antiquity. The expedition takes two years. Fever, ambushes, dwindling supplies. Burton is the polyglot adventurer who treats the continent as a riddle; Speke keeps a ledger of who deserves the credit. By the time they walk back into London, the friendship is finished.

What follows in the drawing rooms of Victorian England is its own kind of brutality. Rafelson gives the expedition its full weight and refuses the heroic shortcut. Stream Mountains of the Moon online on iFILM.