Here is a well-intentioned however temporary, unsatisfying and oddly structured documentary, supposedly about refugees and boat folks … though the refugees’ experiences are solely mentioned within the last 10 minutes or so. The movie is definitely about two Egyptians, Omar Nour and Omar Samra, energetic and affluent younger entrepreneurs who in 2017, in a spirit of journey, took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Problem, a well-established annual endurance occasion with a very good security file through which individuals journey in a rowing boat throughout the Atlantic from La Gomera within the Canaries to Antigua; it’s a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day ordeal in treacherous seas.
After simply 9 days, these two guys acquired into horrible difficulties, maybe on account of their relative inexperience. Their craft capsized and so they needed to be dragged out of the water by a Greek cargo ship, a chaotic rescue that itself may have gone fatally flawed. All of it sounds very tense, though as the 2 males are right here being interviewed after the occasion, we all know that they survived. So what was the purpose of this fiasco? Did they put their households and pals by an agony of fear, only for a macho ego journey? Effectively, round an hour in to this 70-minute movie they inform us that they now admire the sufferings of boat folks and refugees – a few of whose testimonies are duly tacked on to the top of the movie.
After all, refugees don’t have what Nour and Samra had: GPS expertise, hi-tech comms and security gear. And Nour and Samra will not be traumatised by poverty and battle. Positive, their horrible hazard was actual sufficient. However this movie’s viewers is entitled to ask how precisely their new concern for refugees now manifests itself, other than a need to seem on this movie. It could possibly be that they’re doing all kinds of charity work on this vein, however that’s not talked about right here. Maybe it may need been higher to look extra deeply and candidly into Samra and Nour and ask how they’ve modified.
