The Real Story Behind Ron Howard’s ‘Eden’ Is Stranger Than Fiction

Friday saw the US release of Ron Howard’s latest star-studded feature film, Eden. Starring Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, and Sydney Sweeney, the thriller follows a group of European settlers who attempt to build a new society on a remote, uninhabited island in the Galápagos. As they chase their dreams of utopia, they realize that the biggest threat to their new home has nothing to do with the island. Soon the colony devolves into a perfect storm of desperation, manipulation, and violence, and the bodies start piling up. It’s the kind of story that both grips you and baffles you with its unthinkable turn of events, but the craziest part? It’s based on a true story.

The actual events that form the premise for Howard’s Eden are chronicled in the 2013 documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine. The doc recounts the failed attempt of disillusioned German doctor Friedrich Ritter and his partner Dore Strauch to leave modern civilization behind and start anew on the island of Floreana. When news of their resettlement reaches Europe, they’re joined by married couple Heinz and Margret Wittmer and eccentric baroness Eloise von Wagner-Bousquet, bringing with them clashing ambitions and the inescapable ugliness of human nature.  

Geller and Goldfine expertly unfold the events like an intriguing whodunnit, with a central cast of characters that feel too bizarre to be true. “When Captain Allan Hancock brought his cameraman to the island of Floreana in the early 1930s,” Geller and Goldfine told Kino Lorber, “he gave the world a gift by capturing those larger-than-life ‘characters.’” And so it was only befitting to enlist veteran actors to portray them. Featuring the voices of Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Josh Radnor, and Connie Nielsen reading from the diaries of the real-life settlers, the documentary is star-studded in its own right.

“As documentarians, we feel incredibly privileged to have been granted access to [Hancock’s] films so that we could pair them with the actual written words of Friedrich Ritter, Dore Strauch, Margaret and Heinz Wittmer, and the Baroness,” Geller and Goldfine explain. “This combination allows for an authenticity, intimacy, and immediacy that can only enhance the experience of watching Howard’s fictionalized adaptation.”

If you’re excited to see Eden, or if you’re already a fan, you’ll appreciate Howard’s suspenseful interpretation even more by getting to know the real story that inspired it.

Stream The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden exclusively on Kino Film Collection.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013)

Darwin meets Hitchcock in this true-crime tale of paradise found and lost. Fleeing conventional society, a Berlin doctor and his mistress start a new life on uninhabited Floreana Island. Once their exploits are sensationalized in the press, others flock there, building to a 1930s murder mystery. Beyond a 'whodunit’ it is a gripping parable of Robinson Crusoe adventure and utopian dreams gone awry.