How Teens and Endurance Tests Helped Sailing Doc ‘Mighty Mary’ Go the Distance

The America’s Cup is the oldest international competition in the world — beating out the Olympics by decades and the World Cup by almost a century — and, as such, the 175-year-old sailing race has some fun character to it. A yacht club issues a challenge to the defending holder of the trophy, like declaring a duel. Any yacht club in the world, technically, can do it.

Of course, it took until the ‘90s for women to begin participating as crew in America’s Cup competitions. In 1995, billionaire Bill Koch funded the first entirely women-crewed team to compete; that team, crewing the racing yacht Mighty Mary, did better than anyone at the time — except for the extraordinary athletes of the Mighty Mary themselves — expected it to. 

The new documentary “Mighty Mary” explores that America’s Cup competition and tries to embody the spirit of its subject athletes by pushing itself further and faster, cinematically. 

Director Mary Mazzio and her team had a wealth of archival footage to tell the story of the ’95 Cup, from the America’s Cup itself to the media firestorm and local news coverage that surrounded the all-women team as they crewed up, trained, and competed. The documentary crew sat the Mighty Mary alumna down for extensive interviews — as well as the men they competed against, who are intriguingly introspective about their mid-90s machismo as they look back. 

But the film also crafted full recreations of the Mighty Mary’s races, using the same crew, 30 years later, aboard 65-foot sailing yachts; the film split-screens the original race with modern footage that drops the viewer inside (and almost off the side) of the Mighty Mary with its original sailors shouting, leaping, hauling ropes, and generally doing more impressive physical feats in a 0.5-second shot than this writer has done in her entire life. “These are beasts of machinery. If you think of F1, it would be like stepping back into a racing vehicle,” Mazzio told IndieWire. 

If it can work for Brad Pitt, it can work for Dawn Riley, the original team captain of the Mighty Mary who would go on to manage an entire America’s Cup syndicate. For Mazzio, part of the point of the recreations was to offer as clear and immediate a view of what it is to be an athlete, even 30 years later. 

‘Mighty Mary’ © 2025 Richard Schultz. Courtesy of 50 Eggs Films

“Seeing that old muscle memory, the racing memory, was incredible,” Mazzio said. “We lined the boats up and did racing starts. People are screaming. It’s like you’re back in it. And for me, I still compete as an athlete, and maybe you don’t have the physicality anymore, but the [competitiveness] is ingrained; it’s Pavlovian. It was incredible to see how these women rallied. They came off the boat, like, ‘We can still do this.’” 

The fact that the spirit of these athletes hasn’t changed makes the split-screen of the slightly pixelated archive footage, bless it, and modern footage shot by co-cinematographer Peter Levy and a mighty camera team (with Mazzio herself shooting some Super8 footage from inside the boats) really sing. “Mighty Mary” positions the audience to see two different kinds of image but to feel a secret third thing: the drive and the exhilaration of competing that’s universal to athletes, regardless of gender. 

“When you see films about women, you don’t necessarily see certain aspects. The sweat, the profanity, the sheer ‘I can’t do another deadlift’ physicality of going for it and pushing yourself and exploring the outer limits of what you can do. To me, that’s exciting territory,” Mazzio said. 

‘Mighty Mary’ © 2025 Richard Schultz. Courtesy of 50 Eggs Films

It’s exciting territory both by inclination and design. Mazzio’s process on all of her documentaries includes taking cuts to a focus group and running test screenings, which is fairly standard stuff — but specifically for teens. The director told IndieWire that no one will be more honest about a film’s flaws than 12 high school and college students. 

“We had almost no athletes [in the test screenings] except for two lacrosse bros, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna lose these brothers in about five minutes,’” Mazzio joked. But being open to what comes up when you trap some lacrosse bros for over two hours of film viewing and discussion really helped shape the pace and the tone of “Mighty Mary.” 

“As painful as that process is, it yields an extraordinary set of things: moments to speed things up or slow things down, places where they’re like, ‘This has too much of a PBS feel.’ If you can capture a young person’s attention for 90 minutes, that’s amazing. Our films have a lot of music. They have sequences with super fast cuts. That’s intentional, and that’s from the focus groups,” Mazzio said. 

Mazzio and her team track any and all coughs, knee-bouncing, shifting in chairs, every sign that the footage isn’t holding someone’s attention. “There are people who do beautiful artistry where the shots are maybe longer, but there’s a definite method to our goal, which is weaponizing this content for change. How do we create a film that’s going to inspire real change and make it as accessible as we can? That’s what informs how we structure our films.” 

It is by no means as physical as the effort it takes to haul a 55,000-pound yacht around a sailing course, but Mazzio hopes that by editing toward how younger people engage with cinema, she can keep the stories she tells alive longer. “I think about our work for the next generation. How do we get these ADHD, ‘I can only pay attention for short content’ kids to watch a film screening?” Mazzio said. “I had a 16-year-old boy come up to me after a ‘Mighty Mary’ screening, and he went, ‘Epic! I need to see all your movies.’ That we could keep his attention for 90 minutes. I think that’s battle number one.”

“Mighty Mary” is now screening in select theaters.