Metrograph Pictures will be opening the film, The Raft on Friday, June 7, at its theater in New York, followed by US release, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Raft premiered in Denmark at the CPH:DOX festival where it won the Grand Jury Award. It has subsequently picked up other awards such as best documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival as well as special mention at the Athens International Film Festival.
Metrograph Pictures recently acquired the North American rights for this documentary by director Marcus Lindeen which follows a social experiment that took place in the 1970s. Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genoves initially developed the idea for this experiment, and in the summer of 1973, six women and five men embarked on a trip across the Atlantic, from Spain to Mexico, on a free-floating raft.
Genoves’s motivation for developing this social experiment was because he wanted to examine the “origins of violent conflict and dynamics of sexual attraction,” using this group to test his ideas. In the trailer below, the group members are shown reunited 43 years after the experiment, stating that they were “guinea pigs,” and that they were nervous to embark on such a journey for that reason because they were going to be answering profound social questions such as why humans fight and why they love.
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