Stoke lives here. Photo: Patrick Ruddy//@ruddyphoto//FSFF
Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one. Three well-known surf journalists walk into a hot tub…oh, wait, that really happened. There they were, Chas Smith, satirical heart and soul of the surf tabloid BeachGrit, David Lee Scales, erudite host of the widely popular podcast Surf Splendor, and preeminent surfing historian and archivist Matt Warshaw, soaking in a blue-tiled tub sunk into the pool deck of an opulent, sand-side New Smyrna Beach, Florida condo complex, chatting amicably about what, surfing? Politics? Music? Probably all three topics, with maybe some parenting travails thrown in to keep things light.
But as I watched the estimable trio from my seat at a nearby white plastic deck table, not wanting to interrupt their flow just yet, I couldn’t help wonder about where else but the annual Florida Surf Film Festival might you find these three disparate surfing personalities gathered in one place, in fact sitting in a hot tub, discussing all manner of things, before heading off to the festival’s Daytona Beach venue to take in this year’s salty cinematic offerings. There must be something in the East Coast water — and I don’t mean the hot tub.
A non-profit public charity, the Florida Surf Film Festival first darkened the lights and lowered the screen in 2012, with its founder and executive director (and New Smyrna local) Kevin Miller articulating its goal of “invigorating surf culture and artistic appreciation by exhibiting contemporary documentary films with surfing as a focus and preserving narrative from artists far and wide.”
Which the impressively energetic Miller has been doing since first staging that inaugural festival at New Smyrna’s Atlantic Center for the Arts, aided by a dedicated team of like-minded surf film buffs, including co-founder John Brooks, another hot goofy-foot who, now a retired firefighter/EMT, spends much of the year living in Costa Rica with girlfriend Holly Beck, and the irrepressible, unflappable Stephanie Stallard, director of operations, effectively spinning every plate to keeping things running on time and smoothly. Miller and Brooks have also enlisted an impressive board of directors and juror panel, including four-time world champion Lisa Andersen, Scott Hulet, longtime editor at The Surfer’s Journal, and the three aforementioned surf culture chroniclers, Smith, Scales and Warshaw.
Yet as impressive as the operational team is, even more so is how the festival draws enthusiastic surfing fans of all ages and levels of experience from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, with nothing even remotely niche about the crowd who thronged Daytona Beach’s News-Journal Center on June 13 and 14. OluKai-shod parents with wide-eyed, restless groms, tanned-and tattooed, cooler-than-cool surfer girls and boys, silver-haired, gnarly-toed locals and curious civilian couples mingled comfortably with dignitaries like world champ Lisa Andersen, East Coast legend Mimi Munro, South African big wave hellman and adventure athlete Chris Bertish and super-hip master shaper/designer Chris Christenson. All of whom appeared to be reveling in the opportunity to assemble as a collective to enjoy a selection of surf videos that they could just as easily be watching on their phones; sharing the stoke with the person sitting next to them… and the person sitting next to them. Attendance alone an accurate expression of our wider contemporary surf culture: we’re all in this together.
And so on the festival’s opening night they all sat and cheered for films like Arctic Journal, by Paco Elissalde, chronicling a journey of discovery around the Arctic Circle and Scottish isles, Tingle, by Cian Salmon, profiling big-wave rider Zac Haynes, and Bad Things Come In Three, by Finlay Woods and Harrison Roach, highlighting Roach’s uncanny ability to uncork world-class performances on one, two and three-fin surfboards. The evening’s feature film, Shaping The Future by Robert Helphand and Tony Gentile, was a heartfelt, entertaining tribute/character study of decidedly eccentric Newport Beach board-builder Lance Collins, whose garish, eponymous logo cut a colorful swath across surfing consciousness during its 1980s New Wave era. At once fun and poignant, it was a crowd favorite.
If anything, the Saturday night crowd swelled, along with plenty of folk who, in for a penny, were obvious in for a pound of big-screen surf action, attending both nights of the festival with no apparent loss of enthusiasm. The pre-screening schmooze was boisterous and friendly, the bar crowded, the buffet tasty, the vibe inclusive. And it seemed to me, as I sat at an adjacent table next to local author and academic Dan Reiter, both hawking our respective books (his, On A Rising Swell, an engaging examination of Florida’s Space Coast’s rich surf history and wider impact), that an assembly such as we witnessed here might not be possible anywhere else in surfdom. Reflecting, more than the systemic smugness one might encounter had the event been held in San Clemente, for example, a pervasive sense of gratitude seldom expressed by more entitled surf communities. Consider that in The Beach Boys’ 1963 hit “Surfin’USA,” Californian, Hawaiian and (inexplicably) even Australian surf spots get shout-outs, yet not a single one from the East Coast. Perhaps for this very reason, the East Coast’s century old surf culture has produced a community who, unlike so many others, has never forgotten just how lucky they are to be able simply paddle out from shore and then ride a wave back in.
Which goes far to explain how attentively they sat through Luke Pilbeams’ Lucuma, a lovely, meditative travelogue along the coast of Chile, hooted dutifully at virtually every one of Michael Dumphy’s 300 identical Caribbean mysto-spot tube rides in Jimmy Wilson and Sean Benik’s Blue Veil, and jumped to their feet to give a rousing standing ovation for Last Known Coordinates, director Joe Piscatella’s cinematic account of South African Chris Bertish’s almost unfathomable solo, unsupported trans-Atlantic crossing on a stand-up paddle craft the size of your average automobile ferry.
Revealing, as the lights finally came up that last night and the diverse crowd of festival-goers almost reluctantly got up to exit the theater, that as much as anywhere else in the world— and probably even more so —stoke lives here.
Like I said, must be something in the water.
Held quarterly, the Florida Surf Film Festival’s remaining dates are August 23 and November 14-15. Go to floridasurffilmfestival.com for more details.
