Give Back Where You Go

Splinters, the film about the origen of surfing in Papau New Guinea, has had quite the snowball effect… The tale delves into the developing niche of sport and tourism and crosses cultural boundaries by empowering local women as surfers as well. The film won “Best Documentary” at this year’s Surfer Poll awards and has been premiering up and down the coast. This past Saturday night a screening was held at Bird’s Surf Shed and the house was packed. Our friend and talented writer, Andrew Lewis, lends his insight to THEINERTIA.COM and reflects on how this film showcases a step in the right direction for surfing’s social track record…

Take a peak at the following excerpts below:

For as in touch with human nature as surfers claim to be, our social track record is pretty sad. And as the global surfing population grows exponentially each year, our footprint only grows greater. These being modern times, you would think that this increased burden we inevitably placed upon the people and places we visit would spark near unanimous concern for our legacy. Unfortunately, you would be thinking wrong…

Lewis goes on to point out…

Surf films haven’t been much better. Always the self-absorbed bunch, surfers created an entirely new film genre held together by an Elmer’s Glue strength stratagem of “clips” and “color.” The clips, of course, were reserved for the construction of the surfers’ character. The color became an agonizingly homogeneous montage of sunrise/sunset time-lapses, mangy dogs and toothless and wrinkled old men and women. One of the godfathers of this now-abused technique, Taylor Steele, woke up and created Sipping Jetstreams and Castles in the Sky. But the result was largely just a fancier version of the same old stuff, where the surfers were the stars and the people and places they came across were depicted only to the extent of audio-less color montages. Steele really did try to give us a glance at the jungle looking back, but in the end he hardly taught us anything new about it or infected within us a desire to learn more.

With the exception of just a handful of surf journalists and filmmakers over the decades, surfing has had a reputation of letting talents outside the industry bubble sort out its social issues. Journalists like Bruce Jenkins and William Finnegan did a fine job in the ’80s and ’90s of training their pens on the cultures behind the waves, rather than the pro surfers riding them. And most recently, we have academics like Jess Ponting, who created San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research—a department dedicated to educating a new generation of surfers on sustainable surf tourism practices—and filmmaker Adam Pesce, whose documentary Splinters chronicles the conflicts of surfing and modernity with a Papua New Guinea village’s deeply engrained tribal traditions.

To read the full article by Andrew Lewis on theinertia.com click HERE.

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