Surfing the silver screen
've seen a lot of surfing films and television shows.
I've seen mainstream films, Step into Liquid is one of my faves there, and I've seen so many pieces and mini documentaries on surfers, boards, specific breaks, beaches, countries, surfing techniques, surfing history, and surfing trips.
Lately, I've been watching them on Fuel TV, my everyday distraction from mainstream television.
Two I watched recently are worth mentioning here.
I had never gotten around to watching Riding Giants, which is a few years old, and it was my loss. It's 105 minutes of pure documentary filmmaking that sticks with one topic, conquering big wave riding, and perfectly traces it beginnings in the 1950s and 60s and how modern big wave chargers have polished their work.
But on a different level, a film I finished watching today struck me as one of the best surfing stories I've ever seen.
It's called Chasing Dora and it chronicles three surfers, Robert 'Wingnut' Weaver, Marc Andreini, and Mickey Munoz, as they complete a challenge from the late surfing legend Miki Dora, one of surfing's most ironic, iconoclastic and yet purest surfers from the golden age, who died in 2002 at age 67
The three compete in an amazingly refreshing and wacky surfing 'competition' that Dora put forth: surf Jeffrey's Bay South Africa on a wooden board without leashes or wetsuits (it's frigid there) and give the 'win' to whoever catches the longest wave.
What happens in the film is just as pure as Miki must have envisioned: the pursuit, the challenge and in the end the danger of surfing what was conincidentally a 50-year swell comes down to that one wave and how it can change everything.
It's pure story, feeling stoke and well, I don't watch to ruin it too much, but just watching Chasing Dora changed me a little.
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