Martin Popplewell was fifteen when he watched The Blue Lagoon and decided he would live it for real: a deserted Pacific island, a girl Friday, no rescue plan. In 1989, at eighteen, he made it happen, and the stunt turned into a genuine media event, with reporters flying in from the other side of the world to file dispatches on the teenage castaway. Popplewell filmed much of it himself, and that video diary forms the spine of the film, showing the daily mechanics of survival rather than a postcard version of paradise. In 2001 he went back to the Pacific and tracked down his original companion, bringing the two of them together on the same island twelve years on to talk about what the experience actually did to them once the cameras and the newspapers moved on. The film sits between adventure story and reckoning, using the footage he shot as a teenager against his own account of it as an adult, and it treats the gap between the fantasy he chased and the reality he lived as the real subject.