Jul 10, 2024
Hummingbirds
directed by Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras, 2023
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Yemen
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from Sweden
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Maldives
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from Sweden
Hummingbirds
directed by Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras, 2023
Maidentrip (Jillian Schlesinger, 2013)
This is a documentary about the Dutch girl, Laura Dekker, who embarked on an around-the-world solo sailing trip when she was 14 years old. It is largely comprised of footage she herself shot while on the sea. It’s edited in a pretty straightforward way (in other words, it’s not very artsy), but it’s really good.
I feel like the important thing that this film is saying is that some people just don’t fit into the society they were born into, and we really should let them live the life they need - even if they are young and even if the world is scary. Even if it goes against things we’ve agreed are right and good for almost everybody else. Dekker dealt with a huge legal battle with the Dutch government when she first announced her plan, but she was ultimately allowed to make her trip. Obviously it would be a different situation assessing what happened if she’d died at sea - and just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have. But it didn’t happen. She was allowed the chance to do something huge, and she succeeded. She was right that she was fully capable of sailing around the globe by herself. It would have been terrible for her to be denied this experience, and our world would have a little less magic in it if she hadn’t taken her trip when she did.
When she speaks about how right she feels alone at sea and how anxious and unnatural it feels to be on land and around people, I don’t see anything wrong with that. While I am pretty darned introverted, I absolutely need all of my people. But some folks do not require much human contact, and I think we should leave space in the world for them.
Cheers to Laura Dekker and her friends, Neptune and Bird.
Maidentrip (2013) Directed By: Jillian Schlesinger
Movie #017/365
2013; dir. Jillian Schlesinger
A 14-Year-Old Girl Sailed Around the World — And She Brought a Camera
The footage filmed became the new documentary Maidentrip
by Lily Rothman
You may remember this news story from about five years ago: a 13-year-old Dutch girl, Laura Dekker, wanted to sail around the world on her own. Her family had a deep connection to boats and the sea — Laura was even born on a boat — but the Dutch government intervened and attempted to block her from going. She prevailed and set out, 14 by then, for what would become a two-year-long, 27,000-mile trip that would take her around the globe and beyond.
What you won’t remember, though, because the fact didn’t make it into the general discourse about whether Dekker should be allowed to undertake the trip, is that Laura Dekker had a camera with her. In a collaboration with first-time director Jillian Schlesinger (who was not on board the ship but met up with Dekker at a few stops along the way), the young sailor recorded the bulk of the footage for what is now Maidentrip, a documentary about the trip that arrives in theaters on Jan. 17.
In any case, whether or not you remember the initial news reports, Jillian Schlesinger does. They’re how she found Dekker in the first place. “It seemed like there were lots of opinions represented but it didn’t seem like Laura’s voice was represented anywhere,” the filmmaker says of reading about the 2009 court fight. As with many narratives about extreme endurance or precocious ability, Dekker’s story seemed destined to be either an inspiration to others or a cautionary tale — which, Schlesinger felt, didn’t do justice to the details of this particular voyage. She contacted the generally media-averse Dekker, who was eventually convinced that the idea might work, about correcting that problem. “The whole idea,” she says, “was that we were both embarking on something we hadn’t done before.”
The end result isn’t quite a found-footage documentary...
Read more: Maidentrip: Laura Dekker Sails Around World in Documentary | TIME.com
Director Jillian Schlesinger on ‘Maidentrip’ and Collaborating With the Subject of Her Documentary
‘Maidentrip’ Review: A Teenage Girl Grows Older and Wiser While Sailing Solo Around the World
http://dlvr.it/4j0kzq
Don’t Fall For These Asylum-Like Lesser Versions of ‘Blackfish’ and ‘Maidentrip’
http://dlvr.it/4JyycS