The film opens with a standard surf feature cliche — shots of huge, hollow, gnashing waves — but then it cuts to something surprising: a woman in yellow board shorts, running along the bottom of the sea with a boulder in her arms.
“It’s a different and more fun way to train,” said surfer Paige Alms, the woman in the film, speaking by phone from her Maui home. “I do it in the summer when the waves are flat.”
The film, which wrapped late last year, is “The Wave I Ride: The Paige Alms Story,” a 70-minute feature directed by Devyn Bisson which promises to be a highlight of the Honolulu Surf Film Festival starting Saturday at the Doris Duke Theatre.
Alms, 28, is a regular at Peahi, also known as Jaws, which, like Waimea Bay, needs a swell of about 15 feet before it breaks.
Toward the end of the film, Alms paddles into a perfect Peahi barrel. What imbues that ride with deep emotional meaning is the story of how she got there, from a 9-year-old who surfed against boys in meets that didn’t offer girls’ heats, to a woman working to recover from a displaced and fractured shoulder suffered during a big-wave event in Mexico where she was the only female participant.
Films about Alms and other big-wave riders are spotlighted in this year’s festival, which rides the wake of the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational that was held in February at Waimea Bay.
The winner of this year’s “Eddie,” John John Florence, is the focus of the 2015 film “View From a Blue Moon,” a 59-minute biopic and chronicle of recent free-surf sessions in which Florence was joined by Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning and other friends in Australia, Brazil, Fiji, Tahiti, South Africa and Hawaii.
Directed by Blake Kueny and narrated in voice-over by Hollywood actor John C. Reilly, “View” premiered in November “on a big screen in a grass field at Sunset Elementary School, right across the street from Pipeline and John’s childhood home,” Kueny said in a phone interview from his home in Oceanside, Calif.
The concept driving the film — “surfing to the camera,” as distinguished from performing in contests — is Florence’s “pure expression, ” Kueny said. “It’s not to prove anything to anyone, (but to) perfect the style that’s in his head, a freer form of surfing.”
Given time and money constraints, the surfers sometimes had to make do with less-than-perfect waves. “Like watching wildlife happen, you can only get what’s in front of you,” Kueny said. But he got plenty, from lofting 360-degree aerials to swooping cutbacks, to barrels every which way. Judging from “View,” no one in the world is surfing as creatively, powerfully and gracefully as the unassuming Florence, 23.
Along with generous doses of surfing that should satisfy any fan, “View” is filled with counterintuitive music, even a Parisian ballad, and stunning, poetic shots: tubes resembling underwater tornadoes, surfers seen from behind and below the wave, caught in glassy funnels; watery mountains seen from helicopters; dolphins and surfers sharing waves; a humpback whale fading to a Hawaii waterfall pool that echoes the whale’s shape. There’s a lot of weather in this film, by turns moody, impressionistic and sunny, seen not only in the elements, but in Florence’s face.
“View” opens with video of Florence as a towheaded grom getting barrelled at Backdoor and surfing with his mom and two brothers against a soundtrack of Jack Johnson playing and singing about life as a waking dream in a song he wrote for the film.
Near the ending, a soft-spoken Bruce Irons, the powerful Kauai big-wave surfer, tells how, for years following the death of his brother, surfer Andy Irons, he lost his passion for the sport. It was reignited, he says, by watching Florence evolve from a child to the man he is today.
“He draws these lines that no one else draws. It’s explosive, it’s wild, it’s unorthodox, it’s John John,” the older surfer says, and then we see Irons doing some aerials and getting barreled, followed by Florence getting barreled on the next wave.
It’s too bad such a forward-facing work has to include that surf movie cliche — close-up rear views of girls in scanty bottoms — which is something you’re spared in “The Wave I Ride,” a film made by women.
Alms and world surfing champion Carissa Moore, 23, commiserate about their male-dominated sport during a visit at Moore’s Palolo Valley home.
Moore says she doesn’t look at surf magazines anymore “because they don’t run girls” surfing.
“Instead it’s like a butt shot,” Alms says, and the two women laugh. Elsewhere in the film they and fellow Hawaii surfer Keala Kennelly talk seriously about sexism in the ways female surfers are marketed and treated in the media, and the lower prize money and fewer events and sponsorships that are available to them compared with men.
“To show that we are a group and want to be included in these events,” Alms says in the film, she, Kennelly and other women participate in a big-wave event in Oregon — the only one with women’s heats — even though there was no prize purse.
“She’s charging Jaws, and no one really knows about it, which is crazy,” Moore says about Alms in the film.
Things are changing, though, thanks to Alms, Kennelly and other pioneers: The World Surf League recently announced it will hold a big-wave championship event for women in 2016-2017. And the recognition Alms receives from the surf industry at the end of the film makes a delightful surprise for the viewer who hasn’t followed her career.
“The Wave I Ride” is certain to swell the ranks of her followers.
While the Peahi comeback wave, celebrated in the film’s title, was “the best wave I’ve ever caught,” Alms enjoys smaller waves, too. Asked what she loves most about surfing, “I think it’s pretty much as close to flying as you can get,” she said in the interview. “You feel at one with the ocean when riding waves in general; getting barreled is probably the best feeling ever, it kind of just seems like time stands still and you’re not thinking about anything else except that moment.” Big waves, she added, “heighten those feelings.”
Catch “The Wave I Ride,” “View From a Blue Moon” and the more than 30 other oceanic adventures, ranging in length from four to 88 minutes and in places from Mexico to New York to Polar Bear Island, in this year’s Honolulu Surf Film Festival. On July 31 it wraps with a closing party for big-wave surfer and environmentalist Peter Cole, after which “Surfing in the Fifties,” Bud Browne’s last film, will be shown.
Given such a generous lineup, it would be tragic to miss the whole set.
COMING SOON
Honolulu Surf Film Festival 2016:
>> Where: Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Museum of Art, 900 Kinau St.
>> When: Saturday through July 31, closed Monday
>> Cost: $10 ($8 museum members), free for kids 17 and under; $25 ($20) for opening and closing receptions
>> Info: For full schedule, visit honolulumuseum.org.
>> Reception at 6 p.m. Saturday followed by 7:30 p.m. screening of “View From a Blue Moon” and “The Wild”
>> “View From a Blue Moon” also screens 4 p.m. July 4 and 19, 1 p.m. July 28
>> “The Wave I Ride” screens 7:30 p.m. July 9 and 26, 1 p.m. July 13 and 31
>> Closing reception 6 p.m. July 31 will feature big-wave surfer Peter Cole and a panel of distinguished watermen, followed by 7:30 p.m. screening of “Surfing the Fifties.”
