Critics are for once in agreement that Crowsnest: Against All Tides - the remarkable new film from thrupiecefilm/Threadwater Productions is a masterpiece "worthy of its harrowing subject matter".
Crowsnest: Against All Tides - which stars thrupiecefilm staples Jason Stourpaine and Jennifer Aniston Threadbone - tells the extraordinary story of the notorious 2001 Slepe Times-sponsored Round the Bay Single-handed Yacht Race in which eight competitors set out in ten yachts to try to outrace each other over 24 laps of Osmington Bay. It was an endurance test like no other previously attempted and one that was to have huge repercussions for the yacht racing world.
As one by one the competitors dropped out - for a variety of reasons including technical difficulties (two had no yachtsmen to steer them and went nowhere, whilst two sank), dehydration and/or night starvation (a further two competitors), disorientation (one competitor who was last seen heading for Plymouth) and competing commitments (a mother of two who remembered she had a school run to complete) - only two were left standing (surely "sailing" [ed]) as the final hours approached: Professor Brian Thrupiece (in his trimaran Shelley-Lulette III) and Frenchman Jean-Luc Canot de Sauvetage (in La Jolie Femme Coquine).
Exhausted from the constant battering of the waves (wind speeds reached 0.3 knots) both of the remaining competitors crossed the line simultaneously leaving judges Robin Fort-Knox and Sir Drake Cirencester in something of a quandary. Fortunately for them, but unhappily for the sponsors, closer examination of the yachts revealed that the Frenchman had not only used a cleverly disguised jet propulsion unit attached under his keel, but had illegally reduced his yacht's weight by packing Nimble-based crustless sandwiches rather than the heavier competition-stipulated Hovis oven bottom baps. He was eventually disqualified and returned dans la honte to his home in Charlatan sur Mer.
Professor Thrupiece - now the last man standing - was awarded the £15 prize money par défaut and sent on a lap of honour which he completed five days later.
Crowsnest: Against All Tides - the latest of several attempts to capture the drama, pathos and sheer bewilderment of the event on film - has been entered into the Sixpenny Handley Film Festival and is expected (ironically) to win the Palm d'Or (or "Golden Palm") - another coup dans les dents for les malchanceux et rusés bâtards français.
Crowsnest: Against All Tides opens at the Mosterton Odeon on 14 June.
FILM POSTER HERE
Crowsnest is a very English film says director Dierdre Eastman-Kodakowski: it celebrates an unsung hero and demonises the perfidious foreigner: "in this sense it's a post-Brexit film with a whiff of Brut".
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