The Raft

There is no action in this movie. The experiment was practicaly a disaster, resulting in totally different manner than expected. My 8 friends and me were on a boat for 7 days last summer. More things happened to us every single day than this crew experienced in 101 days. Avoid this movie. It's movie about nothing

This is an unexpected gem, as funny as it is wise. I'd literally never heard of the Acali. Fifteen years on, we were still reading Lord of the Flies at school, and all the grown-ups around me were nodding sagely. Had the media told the story this film tells instead of dubbing Santiago Genovés' ambitious project the sex raft, public opinion might have changed. The anthropologist expected his volunteers to develop aggressions towards each other during their long and lonely voyage. They didn't. So he did. Until he broke down and cried for the first time since childhood. He certainly learned something - about himself. I have rarely seen such a convincing demonstration of the self-help truism that aggression, anger and an overdeveloped need for control stem from repressed grief. Who would have thought that a macho man in his fifties could put us vs. them aside after all, and open up so far? Still, what touched me most was the reunion of the surviving volunteers, more than four decades later: most of all Captain Maria, against whom Genovés mutineered, and engineer Fé, whom he tried to set up with the Catholic priest on the expedition for no better reason than the colour of their skins. Fé's story, in particular, made me want to follow the advice an euphoric Genovés gives to everyone after it's all over: build your own raft! She really nailed it when she said (quoting from memory, sorry for any mistakes): I think Santiago's experiment was a huge success, but he missed it.

This documentary, made now by Marcus Lindeen, but dealing with events that happened in 1973, ought to be hugely exciting, (given the subject matter), but is, in fact, quite boring. It shows and describes a journey across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Mexico by six men and five women on a raft as part of a sociological experiment on, amongst other things, aggression by the anthropologist Santiago Genoves.

A good deal of the film is actual footage shot on the raft at the time while in the present those still left alive look back and analyze the experience and it is this part of the film that drags it down. It's like a not very good play in which ancient actors act at playing younger versions of themselves while even the events that happened on the raft turn out to be more than a bit ho-hum. It's really like an intellectual version of "Big Brother", set at sea, and you know how boring that turned out to be. Anyone looking for a bit of titillation is bound to be disappointed.

The premise is fascinating, especially when you get the build up of the first 5-10mins...the problem is...nothing happens.

I'd avoid this sad association with what are usually compelling and insightful Storyville documentaries.

An interesting documentary about an experiment to create violence and tension upon a raft that backfired on the Santiago who organised it as it produced only unity and lifelong bonds despite his provocation.

The old footage is fantastic and the interviews with the seven that are still alive are revealing but I would have liked a description of what happened to the men on the boat after the experiment. Absolutely no background to what happened to them and that lets the film down slightly .

In a way this was the forerunner to reality TV as basically this was Big Brother but on a boat . I'd definitely tune in to watch a modern day version of that .