After five years of start and stop production, Saltwater Buddha the film – a feature documentary film based on the bestselling surf memoir – is hitting the road this summer (starting May 6th in San Francisco) up and down the east and west coasts of the United States and at select theaters in Australia and New Zealand. At screenings in the US, author Jaimal Yogis will be speaking and signing his Saltwater Buddha sequel, All Our Waves Are Water, that comes out from Harper Wave this July 4th.
Here’s what Jaimal had to say about having his first book made into a film: “It’s probably the most surreal – and most difficult – thing I’ve ever participated in. Number one, I’m not a surfer who should have ever been in a surf film. So to be kooking out next to surfers like Holly Beck, Danny Hess, Andy Olive, and Jay Nelson, was humbling. But I also now have the most profound respect for filmmakers. There’s just so much that inevitably goes wrong with funding, then every shoot, every edit, every color correction. Things seem to break every few minutes. But in the end, if you can keep from just throwing the whole hard drive into the ocean and/or never talking to each other again, the difficulties help the team bond. I look back now at the obstacles and just see this beautiful challenge – like the worst paddle at Ocean Beach that you don’t give up on and finally yields a gleaming gem.
The film premiered at the Maui Film Festival outside to a crowd of like 2000 people. The whole team and our families came out for it and to see the shots we worked so hard for paired with an incredible soundtrack from Gregory Allen Isakov, MC Yogi, Sully and the Benevolent Folk, Bird Courage, Silas Hite, and AJ Abberton – to see that with all our kids playing soccer under the big screen and the moon – the whole thing made me cry. I’m so grateful to director Lara Popyack, and producer Mike Madden for having the vision for the film, to Roberto Vezzone the cinematographer, and for Jordan Dozzi for stitching the whole thing together over many late nights.”
