THE RAFT

Five men and six women relive a wild social experiment on the high seas in this top prize winner from Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX festival.

Before Big Brother, before Survivor, anarchic Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés tested the limits of forced human interaction in 1973’s Acali Experiment: 11 strangers – selected for maximum friction – were dumped on a raft to cross the Atlantic. Genovés told the reluctant sailors that it was a ‘Peace Trip’. Somehow nobody had anticipated three months of heightened emotions, leading to everything from attraction to aggression.

Forty years later, Swedish director Marcus Lindeen reunites the participants for the first time. Partly set on a replica of the raft, and incorporating archival footage, media coverage and Genovés’ own diaries, the castaways tell Lindeen their eye-popping story. The Raft is an utterly absorbing exposé of the human animal.

"The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness" – Variety