Jungle Child

Jungle Child (Dschungelkind, 2011) is a German adventure drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Roland Suso Richter adapted the autobiographical bestseller by Sabine Kügler, a memoir that spent years at the top of German book charts. In the early 1980s, linguist Klaus Kügler relocates his family deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea to study the language of a newly contacted tribe.

Of the three children, eight-year-old Sabine is the only one who fits in immediately — she picks up the language, the customs, the unspoken codes that her parents keep stumbling over for years. But the family has landed in the middle of an old territorial conflict, and neutrality proves harder than expected. Nine years later, at seventeen, Sabine is sent to a Swiss boarding school and finds European civilisation just as foreign as New Guinea was to everyone else. Starring Thomas Kretschmann and Nadia Uhl.

The film's real edge is that the culture shock runs in reverse: by the end, it's Switzerland that feels alien. Stream Jungle Child (2011) online on iFILM.