Surf Film Festival / One of the great things about now is that everyone gets their own film festival. Just this year the Islands have seen a Filipino fest, a gay and lesbian fest, a series of Chinese romantic comedies, a Korean festival and an exotic/erotic festival. There’s one just about every month, and in recent years, the growing number of them has started to chip away at a long-standing truism about independent and art-house film in Honolulu–that in order to make a scene viable, venues have to appeal to the widest audience possible, and viewers have to go see absolutely everything.

That’s no longer the case, as demonstrated by the Surf Film Festival at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which opens this week and continues into next. The event, now in its second year, is sponsored by design-dazzling Contrast magazine and has been advertised in a way that suggests a broad mainstream appeal. The films’ synopses are tantalizingly arty-sounding, and for sure, there’s more at work thematically than one might expect, but at heart, these are surf movies for people who love surfing.

The surf festival has a fitting home at the Doris Duke Theatre (its patron was close to Duke Kahanamoku and other prominent surfers of her day) and is the creation of a hui of film and surf lovers, including the Academy’s Gina Caruso, Eric and Jackie Walden of Chinatown Boardroom and local filmmaker Lance Arinaga.

Arinaga’s ICONS2 will have its Hawaii premiere on opening night, and three other films will debut over the course of the festival, including Dear & Yonder, a look at women in surfing, as well as Thomas Campbell’s The Present and the Australian Musica Surfica.

Musica Surfica, which has screened at festivals around the world, explores a mixed-media expedition to King’s Island, Australia, led by Richard Tognetti, the violinist and artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra who is also a life-long surfer. Tognetti teamed up with famed experimental surfer Derek Hynd and others and began a journey to what he hoped would be the soul of surfing. The film includes extensive discussion of ancient Hawaiian hee nalu traditions–though all of it by Aussies and with nary a Hawaiian in sight, it must be noted–and features some wonderful scenes of contemporary surfers trying to adjust to traditional Hawaiian finless boards. Watching two-time world champion Tom Carroll eat it, repeatedly, on his first outing in two-foot surf is both hilarious and inspiring.

The Present is refreshing both visually and thematically–sometimes so much so that the viewer begins to lose track of what’s going on. Campbell is one of the very few filmmakers still shooting in both the medium (16mm film as opposed to video) and the idiom (wide-eyed, playful wonder) of the 1970s. If you were (un)lucky enough to have grown up in that decade or are otherwise familiar with the educational cinema of the era, his film will feel like it was made by your buddy’s older, smarter, stoner brother after a long run as the eighth-grade projector operator.

The festival features seven films overall, plus opening-and-closing night parties, with giveaways and food and drink offerings galore.

Chance ’em!

Dear & Yonder trailer

Musica Surfica

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