To raise adventurous children, as Laura's father learned when she and Guppy set sail, means that someday, you have to let them go.
Laura Dekker, 14, who went missing 2009, was found on the island of St Martin, in the Dutch Antilles 3yrs after, according to the Dutch news agency ANP.
“I was born on a boat in New Zealand. I lived my first five years at sea. And ever since, all I've wanted is to return to that life.” So begins Maidentrip, a remarkable new documentary about Laura Dekker, the 17-year-old sailor who, in 2012, became the youngest person to sail around the world alone. The film debuted on Sunday at South by Southwest in Austin, before a crowd of about 300 people, and will make the rounds on the festival circuit this spring.
Laura’s story sparked an international controversy in 2009, when she announced her plans to attempt a solo circumnavigation. She was 14 at the time and quickly became embroiled in a contentious, 10-month court battle with the Dutch government, which deemed the voyage unsafe for the teen and tried to remove her from her father’s custody. Laura and her father prevailed, and in August 2010, she set sail from the Netherlands in her 38-foot ketch, Guppy.
Maidentrip documents her 17 months alone at sea. There was no chase boat, support staff, or film crew. Laura shot all of the footage aboard Guppy herself, using a Sony Handy Cam she rigged to the boat. The effect is an intimate, arresting portrait of the young sailor, who for much of the film stares wide-eyed into the camera, as though she can’t quite believe she’s doing it, either. Though you never see the camera, it takes on its own personality, a kind of default crew and confidante for the solo skipper.
Director Jillian Schlesinger, 29, who’d read about Laura in The New York Times in 2009 and approached her with the idea of making a documentary about the trip, wanted the project to feel organic and unscripted. “I wanted to let her tell her own story, and give her a voice, in a way that the sensational mainstream media hadn’t,” says Schlesinger. “Doing something so extreme with so much passion is an art, and that’s how I approached it with Laura. I was really interested in finding out why, as a 14-year-old, she wanted to do this. She had no interest in being famous. She really just loves to sail.”
No surprise. Laura was born to sail. When she was five, she and her parents returned to the Netherlands, but later divorced. Laura moved in with her dad, who worked in a boatyard, so she could keep sailing. She got her first dingy when she was six, sailed throughout Holland during the summers, and made her first solo crossing, to England, when she was 13. In the film’s early, archival footage, we see a small smiling sailor dwarfed by her life jacket, sailing a tiny dingy with her dog, Spot.
But out on Guppy on the open sea, Laura grows up fast. She cuts her hair, dyes it red, learns to cook and eat ravioli without spilling it when huge swells hit, starts to swear, celebrates her 16th birthday in Darwin, Australia, with her dad, who flies in to help her repair her sails after a wind-battered crossing, and wrestles with her own identity as a sailor and a daughter. In one poignant scene in French Polynesia, she replaces her Dutch flag with the flag of New Zealand, country of her birth. “I don't have any real connection to Holland anymore," she says. "I don't want to go back. I don't really have a home. Home to me is Guppy."
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