The best surf films for sunny days
- Text by Shelley Jones
- Photography by Dan Merkel
It’s the hottest day of the year in the UK and what could be better than lying in a hammock, with a cold mojito in your hand, and a line-up of the best sunny surf films ever? We’ve selected some of our favourites to help you lounge away the inner-city haze.
The Endless Summer
When a young SoCal surfer called Bruce Brown was discharged from the Navy in the late fifties, he was determined to share his love of waveriding with the wider world. Two years after the idea first hit, he released The Endless Summer. The film, a true story about two surfers who pursue a utopian summer around the world, marked a new chapter in surf reportage and reminds us to this day that there’s more to shredding than just sharp turns.
The Present
Thomas Campbell’s surf filmography includes a neat triptych of art-docs – The Seedling (1999), Sprout (2004) and The Present (2009) – which together breached core boundaries to explore waveriding’s every countercultural verge. The trilogy became a creative counterpoint to the punk-versus-jock dualism perpetuated by surf media, leaving an enduring platform for the aesthetic freaks who had always been an essential but marginalised element of Californian surf culture.
Year Zero
Shot on location around the world and documented entirely in super 16mm film, Joe G’s YEAR ZERO, presented by Globe, is a dystopian take on high performance surfing set in a post-apocalyptic world reminiscent of Mad Max or an HG Wells novel and featuring some of modern surfing’s most inspiring watermen including Dion Agius, Cj Hobgood, Taj Burrow and Damien Hobgood.
Bustin’ Down The Door
The ‘free ride’ generation are immortalised in Bustin’ Down The Door, a film Shaun Tomson helped produce, which beautifully documents the creative chaos and culture clash of 1970s Hawaii and the birth of the World Tour. Things got heavy. Death threats were thrown around and the Hawaiian old guard meted out a painful dose of comeuppance to this new, transgressive crew. By the time reconciliation had been forged, the future of surfing had been written, and the professional circus – complete with sponsors, prize money, however small, and something like careers – started to take shape.
Rio Breaks
Part documentary, part love ode to surf, Rio Breaks is the brainchild of filmmaker Justin Mitchell and writer Vince Medeiros – a storytelling duo who were united six years ago by a tale that needed to be told. Honing in on the Favela Surf Club on Arpoador Beach isn’t a surf film, and it isn’t a politically-laden message about some ‘other’ place. It’s just a story about two boys, charting a very particular path through life. And it’s a subtle one at that, pinned together in beautiful form.
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