Maiden (10/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 93 minutes.

PG.

If this isn’t the best movie of the year, it’s close. It’s a documentary that tells the story of Tracy Edwards’ putting together a crew consisting entirely of women to compete in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race. It’s told entirely without narration. Edwards and her crew and some of the skippers of her competing ships tell the story themselves.

What makes this truly remarkable is Tracy’s amazing foresight. Not only did she have to find a boat (a 58-footer named “Maiden”), she had to finance the entire thing. Here was a young woman, totally without experience of doing such an endeavor, plunging in and doing it all on the strength of her character. She had to put the crew together (there aren’t a lot of experienced female sailors), buy a boat, refurbish it, raise the financing, and be the boss, all herculean tasks, especially for one who had no experience for even one of those tasks.

As to her foresight, mentioned above, she had a camera on board throughout the trip so this film is a complete and accurate record of what they did, and how they did it. She had two cameras, a fixed camera mounted on the back of the boat, and a handheld camera. She said, “whenever it was ‘all hands on deck’ the last person up would hit that button and that’s where we got the images of surfing giant waves and that sort of thing.” So what we see is no recreation, no CGI; it’s the real thing.

The race consists of six legs which, for the Maiden, took 167 sailing days:

Southampton, England to Punta del Este, Uruguay, 5,938 miles;

Punta del Este to Fremantle, Australia 7,260 miles;

Fremantle to Auckland, NZ 3,272 miles

Auckland to Punta del Este, 6,255 miles

Punta del Este to Ft. Lauderdale, FL 5,475 miles

Ft. Lauderdale to Southampton, 3,818 miles

While the trip takes something like 10 months, and all legs are harrowing, by far the most dangerous is the one from Punta del Este to Fremantle, which takes them across the Southern Ocean and its frigid temperatures (-20˚F), high winds, and high seas. Tracy’s cameras capture it all.

The Whitbread is held every three years and totals 32,000 nautical miles. In 1989 it comprised several classes of different boat sizes. Now called the Volvo Ocean Race, it is no longer open to smaller boats like Tracy’s.

The fact that this movie was ever made is truly serendipitous. Director Alex Holmes had a child in a school in southwest London where Tracy lives. The school had a celebration and at the last moment the scheduled speaker canceled. They called Tracy at the last minute, and Holmes was in attendance. He was blown away by her story and called her the next day and said, “Hi, my name’s Alex Holmes, I’m a film producer, I love your story and my daughter just wouldn’t shut up about it on the walk home.” The result is this captivating documentary. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.