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, they 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, Nour and Samra 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.
Truth is sometimes, as they say, stranger than fiction. Beyond The Raging Sea is a good example of that. Why anyone would risk their lives the way Omar Nour, Omar Samra and the other racers did in order to try in cross the Atlantic in what is no more than a glorified canoe is anyone’s guess.
Rowing to highlight the plight of refugees who try to cross treacherous water crossings in order to seek out a new and better life Omar Nour and Omar Samra adventure is both amazing and utterly crazy.
Although undoubtedly gripping, choosing Omar Nour and Omar Samra to tell the story, and thus knowing thankfully that they both survived, does tend to reduce the tension. Whilst the link to the refugee crisis is a bit spurious the last 15 minutes where two refugees talk about their experiences in migrant boats is probably the best and most harrowing section of the film.
Beyond The Raging Sea is a great companion piece to the recently released Io Capitano which is a dramatised account of two Somalian males who try to cross the Mediterranean on a refugee boat.