The Raft
All Films
•
1h 38m
Directed by Marcus Lindeen | 97 mins | 2018
In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on a most unusual sea voyage—a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali, initiated by Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés, who proposed to use the group as guinea pigs in his investigation of the origins of violent conflict and dynamics of sexual attraction. Contentious from the get-go, incorrectly labeled by the media as ‘The Sex Raft,” the Acali mission stayed afloat for 101 days—and now, more than forty years later, the surviving crew members reunite to reenact and recollect their experience, additionally illustrated with extensive 16mm archival footage from the voyage. What results is a document of the thin line between science and cultism in the early ’70s, a touching story of female camaraderie and, in the character of Genovés, an unforgettable portrait of oblivious, toxic masculinity.
A Metrograph Pictures release.
Up Next in All Films
-
The Saddest Music in the World
Directed by Guy Maddin | 100 mins | 2003
Isabella Rossellini is pure pomp and pageantry here as a Depression-era beer baronness—and double amputee—whose glass legs are filled with her own brew. Add to the concoction a sex-crazed amnesiac (Maria de Medeiros), a Broadway has-been (Mark McKinney), m... -
The Silent Monologue
Directed by Khady Sylla | 45 mins | 2008
Khady Sylla’s docudrama inquiry into the lives—inner and exterior—of Dakar’s female domestics, which employs scenes of improvised street theater, direct-address freestyle screeds, candid interviews, and inner monologue musings with the end of allowing its ... -
The Siren
Leaving October 1
Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 100 mins | 2023
Crisply animated in a vivid, minimalistic 2D style, Farsi’s "The Siren" shows us the opening salvos of the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and their terrible human toll, in telling the tale of 14-year-old Omid. As hostile forces th...