Labor Day Weekend Box Office: 'Maiden' Triumphs Again

Documentary about first all-women yachting crew to take part in Whitbread Race sails past $2.5 million

The story of an underdog all-women yachting team is proving hard to beat.

Maiden finished as the top documentary in theaters over the Labor Day Weekend, extending its run at number one. It has now made 2,615,612 in 10 weeks of release, according to audience tracker comScore.

The film by Alex Holmes centers on the unlikeliest contender in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race. An upstart skipper and navigator named Tracy Edwards assembled the first-ever all-women crew to compete, a team experts predicted had no chance of success and poor odds of even surviving the contest. But Edwards and the crew of the Maiden defied expectations.
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The oceans has moods so sometimes it can be happy and benign and gentle, but that's just lulling you into a false sense of security.

--Maiden skipper/navigator Tracy Edwards on the perils of competing in an ocean race

Sony Pictures Classics is the distributor of the film, which premiered last September at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Coming in second over the holiday weekend was Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, directed by Nick Broomfield. The film about singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, a woman who became vital to his creative life, has earned $892,640 in nine weeks of release.

Third place went to another music-related documentary, David Crosby: Remember My Name. The film about the guitarist and founding member of both The Byrds and Crosby Stills & Nash was directed by A.J. Eaton and produced by Cameron Crowe. It has collected $478,332 in its first seven weeks in theaters. 

Two international-themed films filled out the top five. Honeyland came in fourth, the story of the last remaining woman wild beekeeper in Europe, who ekes out a living in North Macedonia. Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska directed the film, which won the top prize for international documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January. 

One Child Nation, directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, came in fifth place over the Labor Day Weekend. The film exposes shocking details of China's one-child policy, in force from 1979-2015, which the directors say was maintained through forced abortions, sterilizations and infanticide on a widespread scale. One Child Nation won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January before going on to win awards at the Traverse City Film Festival, Full Frame, and Sheffield, among other festivals. ​​

Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, directors of "Honeyland," at a screening in Los Angeles. July 22, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

Nanfu Wang (right) and Jialing Zhang, directors of "One Child Nation," at the Sundance Film Festival Awards show. Park City, Utah, February 2, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

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Read: 
>Honeyland directors on their award-winning doc: 'A real life story but it has a strong environmental message'
>Director Nick Broomfield on 'hardest challenge' he faced making Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love
​>One Child Nation director Nanfu Wang on how China imposed its one child policy: 'If women resisted... they would be taken into a clinic to have a forced abortion'

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