Critic Reviews

By setting Genovés’s words in counterpoint with the recollections of seven of the participants who are still alive, [Lindeen] reinterprets the experiment, finding meanings that the scientist missed.

The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature The Raft.

Favored with copious amounts of footage shot during the voyage, as well as Genovés’ collected data and writings, Lindeen forged a riveting and illuminating study of the unscrupulous endeavor.

The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.

It sounds like Big Brother on a boat, but The Raft is an absorbing portrait of a bold (or foolhardy) historical experiment that hits many of today’s hot-button topics, dominated by a compelling and complex central figure.

It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given two things: the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive.

The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.

A thoughtful and fascinating piece, it’s a game of two halves, however, with Lindeen making heavy work of modern-day footage which tends to drag on the dynamism of the past.

This fascinating film, which goes into national distribution this week, reconstructs the event with 16mm footage shot during the voyage, interviews with surviving crew members, and a narration taken from the anthropologist’s diary in which he reveals himself to be a spectacularly cockeyed judge of human nature.