The gripping account of two athletes who embarked on the World's Toughest Row- 3000 miles across the Atlantic- takes a harrowing turn, mirroring the ordeal of refugees crossing dangerous seas.
Extreme athletes Omar Nour and Omar Samra accept the Talisker Atlantic Challenge, a 3,000-mile Atlantic Ocean crossing by rowboat with no assistance, and no stopping. Training and preparing for two years, Team O2 commit their adventure to the plight of displaced people crossing the Mediterranean with support from UNHCR and UNDP. After a slow start and bad winds, sickness, and exhaustion, day 9 dawns in a gale, 600 miles from shore. A rogue wave flips their boat and both men are in the water. With beacons failing, they wait and pray and struggle, fighting 45-knot winds, and riding 8-meter waves. For 13 hours, Samra and Nour face the same dangers and decisions of the desperate refugees to whom they dedicated their row. In this true-life adventure, survival demands a miracle or two.—Cinema Libre Studio
'Beyond the Raging Sea' is an action-adventure documentary chronicling the ordeals and transformational experience of Omar Samra and Omar Nour, two Egyptian extreme athletes who enter the world's toughest competition: the Atlantic Challenge, an unsupported 3,000 mile open-ocean rowing race from the Canary Islands to Antigua. Neither Omar had experience on water when they registered for the Challenge, though Nour had represented Egypt on the Olympic triathlon circuit and Samra was a mountaineer who had climbed Everest and skied to both the North and South Poles. But both were searching for a new challenge and a new cause. After a year of intense training, Team O2 embarked from the Canary Islands heading for Antigua, dedicating their high-profile exploit to the plight of refugees worldwide, for whom unimaginable peril, exposure and even death at sea comes to tens of thousands annually. In an ironic twist, these privileged athletes find themselves confronting the same dangers, fears, and impossible decisions as those they meant to recognize and relieve. As their high-tech, unsinkable, US$1m rowboat capsizes, the two men discover that a mid-gale rescue can be even more terrifying than being lost on a raft, in the middle of the Atlantic. After our protagonist's jaw-dropping rescue (filmed as it happened by the ship's crew), the film pivots to the stories of a Syrian husband and father and a young African man whose own harrowing journeys offer illuminating counterpoint. In the extraordinary ordeal of our two Westernized protagonists, this documentary personalizes and universalizes the plight of refugees, making their lives, dreams and sacrifices our own. - Frederick Greene
