“It’s hard to believe what you don’t see,” says Sanu, a young Sri Lankan girl who’s grown up next to the ocean and seen plenty of people surf in her lifetime. Something she hadn’t ever seen, however, was another local Sri Lankan woman surf.
It wasn’t something girls did where she grew up in Weligama. The expectation for her was to get a good job, marry, start a family, and then mostly stay at home to take care of them. Even Sanu’s friends who wished they could learn to surf abided by these norms. Ironically, Sanu never had much interest in those expectations and it turns out the “good job” would be at the local surf camp where her brother worked. And we all know what happens to somebody, anybody, when they get the bug and decide they’re going to start riding waves. Expectations be damned.
We Are Like Waves is a moving story of a young woman blazing her own path and doing something she loves — something she’ll undoubtedly inspire others to do, too. Filmmaker Jordyn Romero spent five weeks in Weligama immersing herself in the local life so she could learn Sanu’s story.
“We laughed catching warm waves with her, ate food alongside her family, and saw with our own eyes the obstacles she has to face just because she loves to surf,” Romero says. “Though I come from a privileged background compared to Sanu, we bonded over our mutual struggle to become female surfers.”
While Sanu’s parents don’t love that she surfs now, they haven’t tried to stop her. She has friends who also want to surf but won’t without the permission from their parents. There’s fear that a woman loses her feminine beauty when she surfs. It’s not proper in that culture. Worries start to flood in that she’ll get more muscular, she’ll lose her femininity, her beauty, and boys will lose interest. Even Sanu’s older brother had some of those same fears but over time and after sharing waves with his little sister, he started to see things differently.
“Every good change that comes, comes from somebody being very brave and doing something new,” he says.
Sanu doesn’t actually care if she’s changing an entire culture, though. She just wants to show that girls can do anything boys can do.
