Vital Alsar was an adventurer and a scientist. In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, after being inspired by the attempted journey of the Kon-Tiki by fellow sailor Thor Heyerdahl, Vital led an expedition across the Pacific Ocean from Ecuador to Australia with a group of twelve relative strangers manning the crew of the three balsa wood boats. After a first failed expedition, and a second successful journey, Vital commenced a third expedition in 1973, collectively known as Las Balsas.
It's this journey that makes up the narrative of The Raftsmen, the latest work from award-winning documentarian and biologist Chadden Hunter. Chadden has built a filmography with the landmark television series including Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and Life, having worked alongside Sir David Attenborough to bring nature and wildlife into our homes and change our world.
A chance discovery of footage from the Las Balsas expedition means that The Raftsmen became a place for the perfect blend of worlds for the Australian filmmaker, with the raw reality of the open seas and the marine life that call it home pairing with the compelling drama of the surviving members of the expedition retelling their journey and the trials and tribulations of their experience. There’s an inherent tension to this story, but it’s one that makes way for the brotherly camaraderie of the sailors and their end goal of getting to Australia.
Six months on a leaky boat isn’t just a Split Enz song, it was reality for Vital Alsar, Marc Modena, Jorge Ramírez, Fernand Robichaud, Greg Holden, Gaston Colin, Tom McCormick, Tom Ward, Mike Fitzgibbons, Hugo Becerra, Gabriel Salas, Aníbal Guevara, three cats, and a couple of monkeys. The Raftsmen blends archival footage with talking heads, including perspectives from loved ones or journalists who were landlocked and unaware of the plight of the sailors.
What results is a captivating and humbling experience. In one sequence, the surviving sailors talk about the mammoth, overwhelming nature of the waves, with the enormity of them being so overwhelming that getting to the top of another wave took enough time for sailors to take turns napping in the cabin. Elsewhere, the sailors recount Vital’s spiritual perspective of being on the waters, recounting how he expected something otherworldly or unexpected to occur in the open ocean.
This kind of open exploration of the ocean simply doesn’t occur nowadays, especially on a disconnected level like the one that occurs in this journey. The sailors were adrift in the sea with no form of communication, no live satellite feed, and no social media to continually update with their progress. It was just twelve guys out on balsa wood rafts in the ocean, trying to get to a place over 14,000 kilometres away.
We’d often call this kind of story an adventure, and that’s really what The Raftsmen is: a classic, old school adventure flick. Except it really happened, and the survivors are here to tell their tale.
Helping out with that retelling is Chadden Hunter. I caught up with Chadden ahead of the films premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on 12 June, with a follow-up screening on the 14 June. In the following interview, Chadden talks about his path into filmmaking, how a chance encounter with Sir David Attenborough while he was researching gelada baboons in Ethiopia changed his career, and the lengths he went to find the footage and the surviving raftsmen to bring their story to life on screen.
See The Raftsmen at the Sydney Film Festival on 12 or 14 June 2025. Tickets are available here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
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Can you talk about the decision to step away from academia and embrace a different style of academia, which is documentary storytelling?
Chadden Hunter: I was a biologist. I always wanted to share my love of nature with people. So, I assumed that I would go into biology teaching and that a classroom would be the place where I would naturally be showing that love of nature. While I was doing my PhD out in the very remote mountains of Ethiopia, National Geographic magazine came along and did a feature article about my research and my monkeys. The next year David Attenborough came out during his Life of Mammals series, well over twenty years ago. Of course, that's like meeting a childhood hero.
You realise that four people in the world would ever read the PhD, whereas 100 million people would see the film that you made about the monkeys. For me, it was partly the practicalities of wanting to reach more people and partly I felt like while I was in academia and science, there was one half of my brain which was switched off. Hanging around with these producers and directors and journalists and people who worked in the craft of storytelling was really exciting for me. It just kind of felt like it woke the other half of my mind that hadn't been active while I was deep in the pure science. For me, to take complex ideas and really work out how a story could reach lay people as opposed to just other experts was a much more satisfying whole brain experience.
Part of that is understanding of the emotionality of images too and knowing that they can have a lingering effect on our mind. When did that notion of understanding the images also help create a resonance for the story you're telling?
CH: Very early on. I liked photography, and obviously I liked photographing nature and animals. [There was] the very first time I was a scientific consultant working beside a BBC camera team. When you are working besides some of the world's best camera operators, you realise what they could do with the grammar of the edit and with the art of cinematography to really move emotions and shape the whole feel of a film. You know that old saying that a picture tells a thousand words? Nothing could be more true, really.
I’m a very visual thinker. I think there was a time when science had to rely on graphs and words and numbers. And even in science education, we realised that being able to teach people visually and get messages across with visuals can be a much more powerful medium. With TV or film, you've got that entire package where you've not only got stunning visuals, you’ve also got the option to weave in soundtrack and musicality, and that goes deep into our primordial, hardwired brain in terms of how music affects emotions and can move people even further. And then, of course, you've got script and words. So as opposed to other media, which maybe taps into one of those senses, the power of filmmaking is in its ability to pull in everything from the arresting images to the music, which is tapping in one part of the brain's emotions to the verbal story. It can be brought together to be a really powerful combination.
With The Raftsmen, there is this sense of understanding the power of a myth and a legend. Vital’s expeditions are legendary. To me, the notion of exploring legends feels like tapping into something that is hundreds or thousands of years old. It feels like something that we talk exclusively about in relation to Greek myths and legends. But Vital’s story occurred decades ago. Some of the sailors are still around. What was the draw of exploring a modern myth and legend for you?
CH: I was instantly drawn to the romance of the story. There was something amazing about it. It's a funny story about how we found it. My wife and I were in this tiny little tin shed in Ballina, called the Ballina Maritime Museum, in a coastal town in northern New South Wales. It was a rainy day in Byron Bay, so my wife was trying to find something for us to do. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, a small Maritime Museum, how dull.’ You don’t notice it from the outside of the tin shed, but it's been built around a certain object inside.
We went in there, and I was looking at these dusty old models of World War Two figures, and my wife was saying, “Come up here, you should have a look at this.” There, as your eyes adjusted in the darkness, is this massive raft structure with balsa logs that is five meters tall. That's what pokes the roof up. It looked like a prop from a Viking film to me. As you read the dusty plaques, you realise there was a real romance to this adventure that these guys set up to do something quite pure in building these rafts in a very traditional way. They wanted to test this theory about where the South American mariners could have colonised the South Pacific, not just Polynesians. Now that's very noble and romantic and anthropological thing; it taps into this slight romance we have of early exploration.
There are lots of history stories out there, so I thought, ‘Well, that's just history.’ My wife spotted one thing on these plaques, “It says here that they filmed it on 16-millimetre cameras, and that they got the cameras all the way across the ocean.” And then all of a sudden, as a filmmaker, I lean in and I'm like, “What else have you discovered here?” If you think about the first time that an early explorer went up Mount Everest, or the first time explorers went to the South Pole, none of these expeditions were ever filmed. Then you also think about the fact that of those early expeditions, hundreds, if not thousands of people have done them since. They've already been trodden on and it's very hard to evoke the feeling of that very first expedition because you don't have any visuals because they were so gruelling.
So here was this unbelievable treasure, this jewel that there was this the world's longest raft journey that has never been bettered – no one in fifty years has done a longer raft journey – and here these guys were filming it on 16-millimeter cameras. That was the light bulb moment. “My God, I've got to find this footage.” This story really does have traction for a modern audience.
Now, to your point about the myth and legend, obviously, the other attraction about the romance of this story was that it's an adventure that would be very hard to pull off in this day and age. In the early seventies when there was no social media, there was no digital imagery, live TV was few and far between. A lot of this was done without being able to make a global splash. These guys didn't have logos. They didn't have sponsors. It's just something that would never happen in this day and age. If these guys set off now, they’d have Red Bull sponsorship, they'd have an Instagram account, they'd have satellite phones. We'd be watching every single day as they went along. They'd probably have a support boat too. They just wouldn't be allowed to be killed because their product was too valuable.
So the fact that we have this incredibly rich, beautiful film of what was a very old school adventure across the ocean, setting out on very primitive rafts with no nails, no wires, no technology, just fishhooks, it taps into the beauty and majesty about human endeavours and adventures that are kind of timeless. The way that these guys did this raft journey could have happened 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 5000 years ago, but it probably couldn't happen today. There's a beautiful ‘going back in time’ escapism and loveliness to this story that is very hard to come by these days, and we very rarely have footage to go with it.
The other thing that attracted me to the story was Vital’s vision of community and humanity and this kind of one humanness. It’s deliberate that the crew was chosen from seven nationalities and that they had to know more than one language to join the crew. The symbolism of that in a world which feels increasingly fractured and one that feels like divisions in society are being wedged by media and politics [made it important] to connect with a message from 50 years ago which really was about the things that humans can do when they pull together.
That leans back into the emotionality of visual storytelling, right? The rich, beautiful footage of their journey feels like a gift.
CH: My first intrigue in the story was ‘Gosh, these guys filmed it. Imagine being able to find that film.’ As a filmmaker, I'm well aware of the quality of old film versus the quality of old video. Now, if you're setting out today to film something like I would be filming with David Attenborough, then we film in 4k, 8k, you name it. It's stunning. But if you try and use video that's five or ten years old, it looks absolutely awful. The irony of being able to go back to film that is 50 years old, even older, and if it's been looked after, then being able to digitally remaster that film stock is a real joy. It really is like working with Tutankhamun’s gold, you brush it up and it just sings. That was a real gift.
I had to temper my excitement until I knew I could find that footage. It was a wild goose chase around the world. I had leads in Mexico. I had leads in Spain. I had to talk to people all over. Eventually we found not all of the footage that they filmed, but enough of it, in deep cold storage in Los Angeles. We had to get shipped over to Australia. We still didn't know what was on it. It really was like opening a tomb in ancient Egypt. We still had to get the film reels scanned and remastered before we could work out what kind of quality we had to work with. When I saw what was in those reels, figuring out what the potential was there.
Then it was a matter of trying to find the surviving raftsmen. These guys came from seven different nationalities. They’re scattered all over the world, so to try and track them down was another endeavour. A lot of these guys haven't been reunited for over 47 years. It took over a year and a half to find the original raftsmen and their footage.
As you get to hear their stories, you can feel them be transported back to the moments on the raft as they're talking about what it was like to be out there. You've given them a vessel to be able to revisit something that, no doubt, they probably think about every single day. What was the experience of giving them the space to explore their past in this way?
CH: For me, the key to the film was always going to be about making this as a first-person story, a from the heart, visceral storytelling experience. To be able to connect with these guys and start exploring what they remembered and what they didn't remember was very rich. One of the challenges is that so much time has passed; there's this old joke that we only remember the good bits. A lot of these guys really did have fond memories of the good bits and look back on this experience as being one of the one of the highlights of their life, so to try and get them to remember some of the bits that weren't so enjoyable, or the challenges, or the struggles, was hard. They got on quite well.
You say, ‘Well, come on, you’re strapped on logs, you’re at the edge of starvation in tiny, little confines for six months. You can't tell me there wasn't some kind of tension there.’ ‘Oh no, we're all brothers in arms.’ Yeah, okay, that's maybe what you remember. It was an interesting exercise in memory, because some of these guys haven't been asked about this story for 45 years. It really did require some long conversations, sitting with them in their homes, everywhere from Ecuador to Canada to Sydney, over days and days and dusting off old photos, pulling out things that they hadn't seen. Then starting to cross reference the stories, saying, ‘Oh, well, you know, Marc was telling us a bit about the fishing techniques. And, well, Greg was telling a little bit about this storm.’ So you were really going into this world where you were trying to tease out memories that hadn't really surfaced for decades. That was a lovely experience.
Did you have the footage in hand before you interviewed them? Or was that process running in unison?
CH: I wanted to know that we had film footage to work with before I really dug into these archives and talked to them. But as soon as we realised there was enough there to drape their story on, then I was getting in touch with them. What we did do was take some of this digitally remastered footage around to their homes; you see a little bit of that in the films. We were projecting the old film footage on the lounge room walls and doing something akin to an old-fashioned slide night. We just have a lovely evening where we would project this old footage onto their lounge room wall and immerse them in it. We had recordings of some of the songs they'd sang on the boat. It was incredible. Some of these guys would well up. You'd get some teary eyes; it really took them back. We had some of them watching this footage and they’d start to sing along. You can just see the look on their faces they are transported to this timeless moment, this bottled moment in their memory where they were sitting on the middle of the Pacific Ocean, playing guitar, singing a song in Spanish with their mates. So to be able to film them in their lounge room, connecting with the visuals and the audio from an experience that they hadn't seen in 50 years was really magical.
Equally important is that you take us to people who weren't on the raft, in particular, one of the wives who gets to tell her story. How important is it to hear from somebody who wasn't participating in it?
CH: I think it was vital from the very start that we had as many diverse voices as possible. I knew in my early chats with the raftsman that you get some fairly rose-tinted memories of the joy of bobbing around on the ocean and the freedom of being out there and fishing. I realised to give it depth that we needed to have some of those voices of people who had to say goodbye to them in Ecuador when they set off. Because when you're setting off on some logs strapped together from Ecuador, heading off into the world's largest ocean with no very little safety and very little means of communication, you have to accept that a lot of people saw this as a suicide mission. A lot of people thought there's absolutely no way they'll make it.
The Kon-Tiki is the famous rough journey a lot of us have heard of that inspired a lot of people to try journeys like this, but the Kon-Tiki got about halfway and hit a reef. They were famous for just having survived. So, for these guys to set off, not knowing where they would end up, really, for a lot of people, it was a suicide mission.
I wanted to try and track down people that might have been loved ones or people left behind. That was easier said than done. Most of these young guys were single. The Mad Spanish Captain Vital really insisted on these guys not trying to get girlfriends or wives before they headed off. Very few of them did. Even if they did have a partner in their lives, they weren't with that partner anymore. In fact, none of them were with a significant other these days. So, tracking down even some of the children of the raftsmen took a lot longer as well. But again, these are people who were teenagers or kids at the time, and they remember saying goodbye to their fathers. They remember being in tears and being upset that their fathers were heading off. That outside perspective was really important.
Then you've got the layers of historians like PJ Capoletti, who has studied a lot of these raft journeys and documented them, and wonderful Australian journalists like Ian Leslie, that we all know from 60 Minutes, who met them out in the middle of the ocean. To me, some of those voices gave an eloquent perspective on the importance of the journey.
Some of the raftsmen are very humble, and I think it's a generational thing. They just don't really hype up their achievements. If they were Gen Z with Instagram followers and Red Bull sponsors, they'd be banging the drum a lot more. No offense to Gen Z, that is just the way of the world, but these old guys are very understated about their achievements. So, roping in the voices of journalists and historians really gave it that perspective of what was unique about this time in history that set people up on these adventures and about how important what these guys achieved was.
There's this real sense of the admiration and respect for nature too, especially in the discussions where they talk about the waves. I was moved and fascinated by the discussions of the giant waves they had to navigate, and how they would take shifts in having naps. Additionally, there’s also the remorse of capturing sharks who were taking their fish. One of the sailors talks about the guilt he felt about that. So, there’s that relationship with nature which is guided by the awe and the admiration respect for it, but then also the domination of it too, in quite a literal sense. Was that exploration of nature something you were eager to tease out?
CH: Very much so. With my history in wildlife filmmaking and working with Attenborough, I've often be going to remote locations and trying to bring that majesty of connecting nature to audiences. I was instantly drawn to this relationship that these guys had with the ocean. Something that I wanted to tease out was how they saw the ocean, how they felt about it, what it meant to them. I've been lucky enough to go to places like Antarctica to film penguins and there's something about feeling small in a giant wild place. It’s about feeling humbled and part of Mother Nature, part of a planet that's living. That’s sometimes hard to convey to a city audience or to people sitting in their lounge rooms, but it’s something I'm often trying to capture when I'm working with Attenborough.
That was a line of questioning that I was really interested in when I was sitting down with the raftsmen. I really wanted to make the Pacific Ocean a character. I kept asking about the personality of the ocean and for some, it was a bit of an odd line of questioning at first. Then the more I could get them to escape into the memories and evoke the spirit of the ocean, it was really beautiful to hear them get quite whimsical. I really wanted to hear about their loves, their hates, the personality. When they started talking about that love of the ocean, in some of those moments of reflection some of these guys almost forgot about the question they're answering and it's almost like talking about a long lost loved one or a first love. There's a lot of people out there that love the ocean, it has a powerful draw for the human species through millennia, but to try to capture the poetry and the relationship and all you have with the ocean was something that I really wanted to take the time to let those guys express.
How has your work in capturing nature and bringing it to life on screen changed you as a person?
CH: I've always loved nature from a young age. As a kid growing up in North Queensland, I was fascinated with the rainforest in my back garden and with the Great Barrier Reef offshore. That immersion in nature has been in my blood from a young age. There really wasn't a kind of a tipping point or a transition. For me, it was always about getting so excited and fascinated by the natural world that I just wanted to share that with someone, whether it was being a seven-year-old and running in from the garden with a purple beetle and wanting to show my mother, through to academia and teaching. As I said, filmmaking was that medium that just opened up allowing me that ability to reach and move more people.
The time I've been able to spend in nature has been very grounding. It's taught me a lot about the fundamentals of life, about not sweating the small stuff, about seeing the big picture and living in the moment. There's a fairly Buddhist type of philosophy that I think comes out of spending time in nature and a peace that I get from reconnecting with it, even taking my family to reconnect with nature, especially in such a mad, busy, insane modern world that we're in. The maelstrom that we're in with social media and technologies is quite terrifying. I almost think that connection with nature was one that that I not so much took for granted but was a joyous journey for me.
Sharing it is also a joy for me, even now as a filmmaker, there's an even more pointed and more passionate reason for me to want to get stories out like this. There's a purity in the raftsman which I think is quite timeless. It can speak to multiple generations. I sometimes compare it to an old surf film, like The Endless Summer, there's a real kind of escapism to a bygone era. For me, there's a more heightened desire to get these kinds of stories in front of people, to let people switch off, or for people who haven't been to the ocean for a while, if they see The Raftsmen they can be reminded of the beauty of it that they once liked or want to reconnect with.
Everything I was trying to do with the filmmaking techniques, from the sound design to the interview questions to this pacing, was I that wanted you, the viewer, to feel like you were on the raft with those guys. I didn't want to jumble up chronology, I wanted it to feel very in the moment, like you’re there every single step of the way with them. I didn't want to break that spell. A special shout out to my composer, this young guy called Finn Clark, a gifted young Tasmanian composer. We worked very hard on that score because we wanted every note of the story to be driven and shaped by the score. It was really about trying to take that view and give the audience that experience of sitting on those logs and enjoying the Pacific in a way that only those twelve guys ever got to do. And now an audience gets to enjoy it too.
You're an Australian storyteller, but you're telling stories about the world. With that in mind, what does it mean to be an Australian storyteller telling stories on film right now?
CH: It's an interesting question. I spent a lot of my filmmaking career overseas, whether it's being in New York or the UK and I've always seen myself as quite an internationalist. I love Australia. I love being back here. I certainly am a big fan of the state funding support that we give the media industry. There's very few countries of the world that have that kind of support. I want to give a big shout out to Screen Australia for investing in The Raftsmen. We wouldn't be able to make it without the investment from Screen Australia.
Making films from Australia is a nice thing. I like to try and get out of that parochial bubble. I like to think that whether a story set in Australia or out of Australia, there's no reason why Australian filmmakers can't tackle it. I also sometimes roll my eyes when an Australian agency will only invest because it’s got significant Australian content in it, like it has to be an Australian story for Australian audiences. Okay, but if you talk to someone like Netflix or Disney, they're looking for international stores for international people. When I rub shoulders with fellow Australian filmmakers after having recently returned and using Australia as this wonderful base to make films with very talented technicians and crew and filmmakers, I try and encourage people to think internationally.
If I'm making a film about Australian wildlife, I will never put a didgeridoo on my soundtrack. That’s nothing against Indigenous music, I love it, I'm working on some First Nations filming right now, but there has been, I think traditionally, a slight parochialness to our brand. There's nothing wrong with celebrating Australia, but I think as filmmakers, we should be trying to see ourselves on the international stage more and more. That's the kind of thing I try to encourage other filmmakers and emerging filmmakers in Australia to do.