Take eleven attractive people and one anthropologist (and one Israeli), and put them on a raft with no engine sailing from the Canary Islands to Mexico in 1973. You might as well add the instruction “shake well and serve.” Some studies put rats in a cage. This one confined people in the middle of the ocean. No books were allowed on board, and clothing was an after-thought. The journey took three months. No surprise, things didn’t go as planned. They never do in utopias.Director Marcus Lindeen’s reconstruction of the vessel nicknamed the “sex ship” was made for the studio, and The Raft combines a “studio doc” that revisits the experiment conceived by the Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genoves with 16 mm footage of the voyage itself, plus reminiscences from surviving veterans of the passage across the Atlantic. See The Raft before you and your friends try to create a perfect world.
