The Wavescape Surf and Ocean Festival will feature a lineup of 19 films at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF). Wavecape will also bring Slide Night, featuring talks by ocean thought leaders on a wide range of topics – including science, sustainability, adventure and activism – to its program of films to be screened at DIFF from July 21 to 26, 2019.
Heavy Water[/caption]
The 14th edition of the Wavescape Surf Film Festival takes place at the Durban International Film Festival, headlined by the African premiere of smash-hit feature documentary Heavy Water, by California-based South African Michael Oblowitz on July 22.
Heavy Water: The Life and Times of Nathan Fletcher will open Wavescape on Sunday July 22. The film is one of 22 films Wavescape brings to Durban this year, including features and shorts from Sierra Leone, Namibia, South Africa, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others.
Wavescape Director Steve Pike, aka Spike, says that the lineup for DIFF was one of the most exciting in years. “We’re honored to have several other African premieres, such as the incredible story of Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a shark; and the gritty documentary Secrets of Desert Point, a piece of pioneering surf history.”
From Monday July 23 to Friday July 27, Wavescape moves to Arena 5, Village Walk, uShaka Marine World for five 6pm screenings, which are free. The screenings at uShaka open with a lineup of three short films and two features, the soulful Perilous Sea and Church of the Open Sky, a master piece of surf filmmaking by Australian director Nathan Oldfield.
Wavescape closes with Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable, the untold story of Hamilton’s journey from childhood to motherhood and how she lost an arm to a tiger shark as a child. However, her relentless determination turns her into one of surfing’s great pro surfers and big wave riders, despite her disability. Bethany rewrites the phrase “Surfs Like a Girl.”
The midweek highlight is the documentary Secrets Of Desert Point, an excellent piece of historical story telling by Director Ira Opper, who chronicles the story of how a young Californian and his friends stumble across a perfect wave in the early 1980s from leaky boats among the remote islands of Indonesia, but it was fraught with dangers, from drugs to pirates and deadly coral reefs.
Spike says there are also excellent films about travel – the quest for reach for something precious, like the soulful travels of a Moroccan who brings clean water to the poor communities of Africa while working his way towards the infamous waves of Skeleton Bay in Namibia. The Seawolf is pure surf soul as we follow “eight surfers on a two-year journey to remote places to find the most dangerous waves on terrifyingly shallow rock slabs. Filmed in high definition 4k on Red Cameras, this is a enriching viewing experience”.
Several films tackle the emotional side of the human condition, such as Finding Purpose, a short film about Durban big wave surfer Tammy-Lee Smith who finds purpose riding big waves after pain and loss. A Million Waves tells the story of Kadiatu Kamara, 19, who is left to face the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone alone after her dad dies. She finds hope surfing in the waves.
In Visit, we travel with a shy, former street kid from Durban on his trip to England to visit the land of the funders who saved him from disappearing down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole. There is Adam, an award-winning short film about a Cape Town surfer diagnosed with a chronic form of cancer; or Awen, in which we see the uncomfortable reality of a young Chinese man who clashes with his mother because she wants him to become a fisherman like his ancestors, but he just wants to go surfing.
However, beyond the pain of being human come films to celebrate the visual poetry of the natural world, and the spiritual enrichment that the act of surfing and being in the ocean brings. Sea Lone eulogises some of the world’s top women longboarders on a surf trip to Sri Lanka.
Shape Qui Rit is a cute short about a two year old girl who “shapes” her dream surfboard; Night Rose sees an elderly lady in England transported by a vision into the ocean for a night surf; Black Rain catches a session in the tropics that cracks with the sea surface chatter of a thunderstorm, while The Edge Of North follows top British surfers to Scotland for a refreshing surf trip on the doorstep of their home.
The 2015 Wavescape Surf Film Festival has announced a record lineup of 23 movies over a week at the 36th Durban International Film Festival, which takes place from July 16 to 26.
Every conceivable film technique and technology is represented in an extraordinary selection of films, according to Spike from Wavescape, co-director of the Wavescape festival. “We have some excellent documentaries, including the hair-raising story of the Signal Hill Speed Run (pictured above) in California that started downhill skateboard racing.”
Wavescape 2015 boasts 12 short films and 11 medium or feature length movies that reflect a unique diversity. A unique trilogy of poetic shorts form a beautiful rendition of surfing in the UK: Sea Fever – and Irish film set to a John Masefield poem and gritty black and white footage; Edges of Sanity – a uniquely powerful piece narrated by Charles Dance who plays Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones; and Chasing Rumors – moving from the clamor of a football match at Newcastle United to the nearby Tyne River where storm waves pound grimy shores.
Included are films from the most remote wildernesses of Alaska (Arctic Swell) (pictured above) and the Arctic Circle (The Cradle of Storms). But from these frozen wastelands and frigid waves we sweep to the translucent tropical waters and reefs of Indonesia in the Mentawai Drone Movie, a short shot entirely by aerial drone.
“Don’t miss the languidly beautiful pace of Bella Vita that takes us to Tuscany as an Italian surfer and activist retraces his ancient roots, or the hard-hitting feminist film Flux: Redefining Women’s Surfing that ask serious questions of the surf industry.”
“One of my favorite shorts is Narcose, an artistically rendered account of world apnea free diving champion Guillaume Néry’s hallucinations caused by ‘raptures of the deep’ during one of his dives,” says Spike.
There are films about skateboarding in the urban precincts of Cape Town, and keeping within themes of sustainability, two South African shorts about wooden surfboard craftsman. From the epic surfing and slo-mo definition of world class surfing inAttractive Distractions, we move to Always on the Road, a beautifully shot film that traces the old surf routes of Europe along the Basque countryside, as well as France and Portugal.
There are obligatory soul surfing movies (I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, Missing, Rail to Rail and Se7en Signs) to a heady mix of high action surfing that can be found in Missing, Attractive Distractions, Strange Rumblings in Shangri La andPipeline and Kelly Slater.
And with any selection of surf films, there is the whacky wildcard: Expencive Porno Movie (sic) (pictured above) spoofs the “surf porn” genre, of endless shots of waves and wave-riding, with a cheesy 1960’s Austin Powers theme. The widest collection yet hails from locations such as Namibia, Cape Town, Hawaii, California, Indonesia, Portugal, Spain, Alaska, Patagonia, and Australia.
The seventh annual Wavescape Surf Film Festival kickstarts the 2010 summer season in Cape Town with a bumper crop of adrenaline-charged surf movies.