What could possibly go wrong when ten beautiful strangers — six women and four men — are thrown together in cramped quarters for a closely observed transatlantic voyage? Surprisingly, not the kind of wrong Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés had hoped for when he conducted this very test in 1973, putting his chosen guinea pigs on a set-adrift steel raft named the Acali that he envisioned would turn into a hotbed of interpersonal strife and aggression.
As Swedish artist-filmmaker Marcus Lindeen’s documentary “The Raft” compellingly retells with the help of archival footage, new interviews, and artistic reconstruction, this one-of-a-kind experiment in human behavior — which Genovés called the “Peace Project” — wound up revealing as much about its controlling mastermind as it did the searching souls he recruited for what became 101 days of extreme waterborne isolation.