This New Documentary Spotlights the “Feminist Heroes” of Surf Tradition

A couple of days earlier than I meet Australian director Christopher Nelius over Zoom, England beat Germany 2-1 within the UEFA Girls’s Championship at Wembley. Rightfully celebrated by soccer followers and politicians alike, it’s not lengthy earlier than on-line discourse faucets into the monetary discrepancies between these girls and their male counterparts. The next day at a London ebook launch, an editor factors out that the ladies needed to actually win the event to obtain the popularity. Ladies Can’t Surf, Nelius’s new documentary inspecting the sweeping sexism that pervaded surf tradition within the Eighties and 90s, subsequently feels very topical. “It’s a terrific demonstration of simply how laborious girls need to work to be taken severely,” he remarks of the characteristic, inadvertently echoing the editor’s sentiment.

Practically seven years within the making, the documentary {couples} present-day interviews with legendary pro-surfers – Pam Burridge, Pauline Menczer, Jodie Cooper, Wendy Botha, Lisa Anderson and extra – with archive footage from early excursions. Nelius says he turned immersed within the storytelling and myth-building tradition that surrounded male pro-surfers whereas working with Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll on the documentary sequence, Storm Surfers. “They’d inform me these loopy tales about what an anarchic, free sport it was, and about attempting to get cash to go from right here to there. Someplace alongside the road, I assumed, ‘If these guys have been scrimping and saving, how the hell did the ladies do it?’.” Witnessing a gendered change within the surf demographic at Bondi seaside additional solidified his must make the movie. “That’s actual social change, proper in entrance of you. I wished to know the way that occurred.” 

When Nelius first started reaching out to the ladies who seem on display screen – every of them a world document holder at one time or one other – he was met with a largely cagey response. “That era has been burnt quite a bit,” he explains. “So a few of them have been like, ‘What do you need to know this for?’ and others have been like, ‘We’ve been ready 20 years for somebody to inform this story’. I describe all of them as superheroes who’ve hung up their capes, and so it was a matter of them having to dig again into their reminiscences. I feel [a lot of them] felt like they’re at a degree the place they’ll converse the reality, say what they need to say, and really feel supported by the truth that society has modified.” 

The archive footage particulars this alteration, with early clips harnessing the gross attitudes of the time (in a single, Australian pro-surfer Damien Hardman tells the digital camera, “They simply must appear to be girls, look female, look engaging and costume properly”) and later sequences highlighting the adjustments that adopted, just like the arrival equal pay in 2018. Private tales of homophobia, poverty and consuming issues supply an additional image of the misery skilled in pursuit of goals, whereas the movie’s title displays the period’s wider pondering. “It’s clearly a fairly provocative factor,” acknowledges Nelius, who labored carefully with the author and editor Julie-Anne De Ruvo, “nevertheless it additionally will get to the crux of what the movie is about.”

Regardless of depicting feminism at work, the time period is barely uttered within the documentary (or its accompanying advertising). Largely says Nelius, it is because the group – whose collective actions have been the genesis for the way the game operates at present – didn’t contemplate themselves a part of the motion. “None of them have been feminists with a capital F. They have been simply younger athletes with stars of their eyes, desirous to be world champions. There was nothing actually political about them, even Layne Beachley and Rochelle Ballard, who turned these political forces throughout the business, didn’t begin out that manner,” he explains. “I describe them as unlikely feminist heroes. They found that ‘oh, this dream does not apply to us, it solely actually applies to the lads’ and met the problem head-on by pure intuition of character. I really feel like they most likely didn’t perceive their very own significance till the browsing physique introduced equal prize cash.”

“There’s a lesson to be discovered about how social change occurs,” Nelius continues, reflecting on a very important second when heavyweight surf manufacturers embraced their feminine viewers and launched new gender-specific strains, in the end affecting little change on the high. “I used to be blown away. Roxy began the Roxy revolution, immediately promoting extra girls’s clothes than males’s, and I assumed then it could have modified, nevertheless it didn’t. The picture of girls’s browsing was propping up quite a lot of the surf world with the cash generated, nevertheless it was nonetheless the lads that have been making the selections. That was merciless, and I discovered an enormous lesson of simply how bloody laborious girls need to work.”

Ladies Can’t Surf is out on 19 August 2022.