Available on DVD: BIG RIVER MAN
John Maringouin’s portrait of Martin Strel premiered at last year’s Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Cinematography Award, and played more than a dozen other festivals, including the Hamptons, where it picked up the Wouter Barendrecht Pioneering Vision Award. The film came to DVD last week after a limited theatrical release.
The Slovenian long-distance swimmer at the heart of Maringouin’s film might defy viewer expectations – this is no lean, young Michael Phelps type – Strel is in his 50s, has high blood pressure, drinks a lot, and is, frankly, pretty fat. Having set Guinness World Records for swimming the lengths of numerous famous rivers – the Danube, the Yangtze, the Mississippi – BIG RIVER MAN follows his efforts to swim the more than 3000 miles of the Amazon in 2007. Like the best documentaries, it’s not really this feat that makes the film so watchable, it’s the man himself. LIke one of Werner Herzog’s protagonists, Strel basically loses himself in his obsession, risking his health and life to meet his goal, and Maringouin’s there to capture it in its delirious glory.
what (not) to doc 