Editor’s Note: This article was updated on July 9, 2025 with new information.
By Terry Galvin
Thanks to a new documentary, we can know intimately the story of four-time World Rowing Championship medalist and ocean rower Angela Madsen, a paraplegic who celebrated her 60th birthday in 2020 while trying to row alone across the Pacific. Madsen died the next month when she was nearly halfway to Honolulu.
The 82-minute film Row of Life, which premiered June 19, was made because Madsen, an American and Marine Corps veteran, asked Soraya Simi to make a record of the effort, Madsen’s second solo trans-Pacific attempt. Simi at the time was 22 and had graduated from the USC film school the year before. A short documentary Simi had made of 40 days sailing on a large educational vessel had piqued Madsen’s interest.
But what Simi directed in her first feature documentary is a polished, beautifully shot and edited work. It premiered at the Downtown Community Television Center’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City, an official Academy Award-qualifying theater.
Among the 10 people who came on board as executive producers for the film is Sue Bird, who formed woman-focused media companies after retiring from three decades in the WNBA.
As the Covid pandemic spiked in 2020, Simi became a part of Madsen’s support team, which consisted almost solely of Madsen’s wife, Deb Madsen. The film shows the Madsens’ weather analyst as an LA television news meteorologist who broadcast forecasts and updates to viewers after becoming interested in their effort.
The budget for a planned 20-minute film was $6,000, requiring Simi to tap every resource a young film-school graduate could scrounge up.
Simi is in front of the camera only a few times. She helped Deb Madsen contact the Coast Guard when Angela stopped responding to texts and calls. She also led the camera crew to the Marshall Islands after they heard that Madsen’s 20-foot boat had washed up on an atoll there months after a German cargo ship had been diverted to recover her body.
Promises kept for an amazing woman
The film is an unsparing look at a woman with a matter-of-fact approach to challenges that was shaped by hardships overcome by toughness and drive.
Madsen looks at the camera in a pre-departure interview, her face and shoulders barely fitting in the frame, when she says, “Someone once told me I was born with a resilient trait and I said, ‘No, I’ve just had more opportunity to practice than other people have.’
“It’s a capability we share, as humans — to be capable.”
The first words heard in the film are Madsen’s, spoken in voice-over of an aerial shot of her rowing her ocean boat across the screen.
“I’ve had a vision of getting to the finish line — I get to claim victory, and it’s documented.”
Simi and Deb Madsen have made sure two parts of that dream came true.
Simi overcame huge obstacles to finish the film, as she promised Angela she would do.
And near the end of the documentary, Angela Madsen’s granddaughters and Deb Madsen are on a sailboat carrying a box of Angela’s ashes into Honolulu Harbor, the planned destination of her epic row.
Deft editing of video from many sources
Biographies can drag as slowly as a trans-ocean row crawls across the map. But this film deftly intercuts background, key information and dramatic recreations of moments during her Pacific crossing. The pacing varies and never seems hurried, though most scenes last only a handful of seconds.
Archival footage recounts Madsen’s rows with teammates twice crossing the Atlantic, once crossing the Indian Ocean, and once circumnavigating Great Britain. Interviews with veteran ocean rowers Chris Martin, Roz Savage and, later, Cyril Derreumaux, put the endeavor in context. Other video clips quickly summarize Madsen’s achievements as a para-athlete and the increased “level of difficulty” of her life caused by being dependent on others and a wheelchair.
Shown rowing at one point, Madsen takes off her top, complaining that she gets rashes because of the scars left when she lost both breasts to cancer in 2002. Her spinal-surgery scars and a tattoo are visible on her lower back.
Savage explains that a parachute drogue anchor is used in storms to hold the boat bow into the waves when seas are high, information that becomes deadly relevant later.
Madsen is shown training on an erg in the middle of the night as her voice relates that the rods in her back hurt and interrupt her sleep. We see her packing, checking expired freeze-dried food, and being launched at night from a trailer at a Marina del Rey boat ramp to begin her solo voyage.
Two losses threaten to end film project
Simi later says that Angela’s death almost made her quit the project.
The loss of all the at-sea video Angela had taken made the documentary seem impossible.
Simi and her small crew had set up Madsen’s boat to make her “an autonomous filmer.”
In that time before high-bandwidth, individual satellite communications became affordable on the project’s tiny budget, video could not be uploaded to Simi. And when Simi traveled to the atoll in the Marshall Islands to examine Madsen’s abandoned boat, she found that it had been stripped of cameras, storage cards and any hope of recovering video. She stayed a month searching in the Marshall Islands without success.
Instead, to illustrate what life alone on a small rowboat at sea was like, Simi and her production team used shots of her 2013 unsuccessful solo Pacific crossing attempt and other rows. The sometimes shaky clips of a passing whale, a sea turtle, a ship, a moonlight trail of reflection to the horizon, are the background to voice recordings and recreations of text messages from the fatal 2020 attempt.
“We re-created the row as precisely as possible based on what actually happened while Angela was at sea in 2020,” Simi said in an email interview.
Video graphics show her course on a map and recreate text conversations between Madsen, her wife and others.
Madsen voiceovers during an on-screen storm tell of her injury during a Marine Corps women’s basketball team practice, the operation that put her permanently in a wheelchair in 1993, her being abandoned by her live-in girlfriend and evicted when she was released after three months in the hospital, and becoming homeless and suicidal before changing her life.
“I learned how to stop being adrift and angry, and learned how to navigate,” she says to the camera.
A record of achievements
In addition to winning a silver medal in the single at the first ever international event for adaptive rowing, the 2002 World Rowing Championships, she won World Rowing gold three times in the double with fellow American Scott Brown. She and Brown represented the U.S. in the first appearance of adaptive rowing at the Paralympic Games, in Beijing in 2008. She also won a bronze medal in the shot put at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London.
In 2009, Madsen and Helen Taylor of the U.K. were the first women to row across the Indian Ocean, doing so in a team of eight. She was part of two teams that rowed across the Atlantic. In 2014, she and Tara Remington of New Zealand rowed from Long Beach, Calif., to Honolulu. In 2013, her first attempt to row solo from California to Hawaii ended by being hoisted into a Coast Guard helicopter after only nine days because of heavy seas. That time, her boat was thought lost until a fishing boat spotted it and returned it to her.
She was a 14-time Guinness World Record holder.
She wrote a memoir, Rowing Against the Wind, published in 2014. She also was the subject of one in a series of half-hour AT&T Original Documentaries.
USRowing posthumously awarded her the 2022 Isabel Bohn Award for “achieving measurable success in expanding rowing opportunities for those with physical and intellectual disabilities.”
She received the Athletes in Excellence Award from The Foundation for Global Sports Development in recognition of her community service efforts and work with young people, including founding the California Adaptive Rowing Program.
After seven days of showings at Firehouse Cinema, Row of Life will be shown at select theaters. It has no distribution or streaming deal yet.
A screening and a following panel discussion were held June 27 at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif., in conjunction with Angel City Sports’ 11th annual Angel City Games.
Angel City Sports, which promotes adaptive sports and mentors athletes, will hand out its Angela Madsen Courage Award, which honors a veteran or first responder who embodies Madsen’s life and legacy. Madsen coached rowing, shot put and javelin parathletes for Angel City Sports from its founding in 2013.
More information on the film is available online.
