It's with great excitement and joy that we can announce that after five years of production, 'The Sea Decides' has been selected for the 2021 edition of New Zealand's DocEdge Film Festival, and therefore will have the honour of a world premiere on June 6.
Being selected for DocEdge is a bit of a dream come true. Regarded as one of Australasia's two biggest and best documentary film festivals (the other big one is the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, we're told), to have been selected is a real honour. In fact, we've been told that over 1400 films were submitted for this year's edition and only 80 were selected!
But even more exciting is the fact that the film will be seen in a theatre for the first time on June 6 in Auckland at the SkyCity Theatre, then again on June 20 at the Roxy Cinema in Wellington!
It's seems an age ago that I took a taxi out to the Raffles Marina in Singapore on August 5, 2016 to begin filming Grant Rawlinson on his journey that would become 'The Sea Decides'. On that day I filmed him packing the boat for a training row he and Charlie Smith were going on that weekend. And if someone had told me that day that it would be a labour of love that would take five years to complete, I often wonder if I'd have gone ahead with it.
As it was, I filmed Grant that day, then joined them on the boat that weekend for 14 hours as they rowed from Raffles Marina around to Sentosa and the adventure had begun!
The good news is that it's still not over and while I'm not sure we can say the best is yet to come – I can say it's going to be a brilliant way to end the journey!
More to come in the next couple of weeks as DocEdge announce the festival programme!
In the meantime, you can visit DocEdge and see the film's first write-up at https://docedge.nz