Exclusive: 20th Century Studios has boarded an adaptation of Children of the Jungle, with Giannina Scott aboard to produce and Roberto Bentivegna penning the script. Scott will produce through her Cara Films banner alongside Scott Free’s Ridley Scott and President of Film Michael Pruss.

The script is based on investigative journalist Mat Youkee’s book Forty Days in the Jungle and follows the June 2023 rescue of four Indigenous children after the light aircraft carrying them crashed and left them for 40 days in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Their challenges have been heralded as one of the great survival stories of all time.

Through interviews with the family, members of the Indigenous community and military search teams as well as elders from Colombia’s Amazonian communities, Forty Days in the Jungle recounts the story in the words of its complex young characters. It goes deeper, however, in investigating the brutal history,...