When most teenagers want to be alone, they stomp up to their room and close the door; Laura Dekker circumnavigated the globe solo, in a 38-foot ketch.
Jill Schlesinger's new documentary Maidentrip is a record of the 15-year old Netherlands resident's celebrated (and controversial) voyage, compiled mostly out of footage she shot herself over two years at sea.
Considering that Dekker also was operating a boat the entire time, her video-diary style cinematography is impressively vivid, and she's pretty good company as both narrator and subject (although her idylls on dry land at different international ports of call break up the monotony of so many scenes shot in cramped quarters).
If it at times, the movie ends up communicating the boredom of such an isolated endeavour, that's necessarily a criticism. Maidentrip pays tribute to a very relatable kind of adolescent stubbornness, which has been honed into a heroic endeavour – a likably odd girl's self-styled odyssey.
Adam Nayman