Graham Dorrington is an enthusiastic English aeronautical engineer on a mission to revive the airship, that ill-fated aeronautic conveyance otherwise known as the dirigible or zeppelin, to fly over the Amazon canopy. His eagerness is diminished by the memory an incident 10 years earlier, in which photographer Dieter Plage was killed. This film records an expedition to Guyana, where Dorrington and his small crew of researchers, technicians, and porters struggle with the elements, the laws of physics, and one another as they try to get a new vessel off the ground. Mr. Herzog, who has made a specialty of finding obsessives and eccentrics who push themselves to extremes, asks questions, films, and narrates the result.