Doc Corner: Hitting the High Seas with ‘Maiden’ and ‘The Raft’
Thursday, July 11, 2019 at 10:30AM By Glenn Dunks
Did anybody see that Colin Firth movie about the amateur sailor who attempted to circumnavigate the world and failed miserably. It was called The Mercy, and while I never watched it, I did think of it as I watched Maiden. This is a film with such a remarkable true story that I couldn’t believe nobody had made a film out of it already but they had made The Mercy. Although I suppose one shouldn’t expect more: a movie about a male failure will almost always get made before that of a female success. But now we have Maiden, which puts a full stop at the end of that and seeks to settle a few more filmmaking blindspots with its oft-exhilarating telling of Tracy Edwards, a 24-year-old rebel who in 1989 became the skipper of the first ever female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World boat race.
Bless whoever invented the 16mm camera because anybody whose worth having a documentary about them apparently had one of them handy all the damn time...