Full-length documentary: World champion surfer Italo Ferreira, scrutinised, lionised, in upcoming film, “Evil is normal on this planet and most people don’t share his capability for love!”

When a man's poor he's hungry for everything, not only for bread. And so he becomes a surfer from necessity, from ambition. 

Contrary to many opinions, Italo Ferreira isn’t unpredictable.

He’s very predictable.

He makes a pattern of his future and he follows it stubbornly.

This film, made by director Luiza De Moraes, a relatively small-fry filmmaker although this is no reflection of her fine work, follows the trajectory of Italo from kid growing up in a little beach town, poor as anything, to earning a million bucks a year as a pro surfing world champ.

It’s an old and hackneyed story, but in Italo’s case it’s true: the key to the pro surfing kingdom wasn’t presented to him on an upholstered velvet cushion via a dad that surfed, a benevolent sponsor and a training program where men stand on the beach under an umbrella filming the children for later review of technique.

When a man’s poor he’s hungry for everything, not only for bread. And so he becomes a surfer from necessity, from ambition.

In 2014, when Italo would finish seventh on the WQS, Dino Andino, whose own son would miss his first tour victory four years later because of Italo’s preternatural ability, came up to Timmy Patterson, Italo’s shaper since he was fifteen, and said, “Who is that Italian guy? He’s doing floaters on eight-foot closeouts on grinding beachbreaks and making ‘em. He’s going to be on tour next year. That guy’s a freak.”

Energy. Spirit. Passion. More hackneyed phrases.

But, for Italo, they just work.

Movie releases July.

 


Puerto Rican surfer Dylan Graves flouts fears of instant brain death and rides most dangerous wave yet: “I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this.”

Wild and beautiful.

In episode three, season three, of Vans’ Weird Waves series, which is hosted by the Puerto Rican shredder Dylan Graves, the essential nature of fun is explored over the course of a series of vignettes.

The most revealing is the examination of the work of Orange County surfer Parker Cohn.

Parker, who is twenty, has discovered a surge of water that pushes through a naturally occurring archway and onto a battlefield of barely submerged rocks.

“Hopping fences, running from security guards, guaranteed to lose skin on the reef, all to get away from the chaos of southern California’s waves,” says Graves.

“This is Narnia, and to get there you have to go into your grandma’s closet, open the door and crawl in,” says the mysterious Cohn.


Breathtaking: Hawaiian Mason Ho makes Endless Summer-style discovery in Mexico, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings!”

Tiny empty tubes for happy Hawaiian… 

In this short film, released today, we find Mason Ho south of the now non-existent US border, riding sand-bottom tubes reminiscent of Bruce Brown’s famous Cape Saint Francis discovery in 1962.

The waves are little but are so brilliantly turned out, that once combined with Mason’s goofiness and pert little body, the director is gifted money shot after money shot after money shot, like a barebacking gang-bang scene in a rock-and-cock movie.

 


Eleven-year-old New Jersey tween lands trick that has eluded world champion surfers for forty years! “Your feet came over your back!”

Fantastic, by any imaginable standard… 

New Jersey surfer Cruz Dinofa, who is eleven years old, has landed a backside front flip, the first of its sort, at a wavepool in Waco, Texas.

Dinofa, who frequents, mostly, 7th Street in Ocean City, inherits the tireless and repetitive energy as well as the futurist worship of his aerial forefathers, Martin Potter, Matt Archbold, Christian Fletcher, Kelly Slater and so on.

This backside front flip has a poetic logic, as well as an impish cultural irreverence, and is proof that wavepools, at least in the realm of the fetishised technical air, will remove the mysticism of above-the-lip surfing.


Puerto Rican surfer Dylan Graves rides ten-minute, three-mile wave in “We thought we’d opened another dimension in time!”

Impossible to resist.

In the third season of Vans’ Weird Waves series, which is hosted by the Puerto Rican Dylan Graves, we detour into the fundamentally complex world of tanker surfing in Texas, where the wakes of these giant vessels are chased down, wrangled and driven hard into the dirty water.

The almost-forty-year-old Graves, a favourite of BeachGrit,  acts out the drama for our entertainment; his look, the hair falling to his shoulders, the very good but still accessible surfing, the vivacity, creates the cumulative effect of us all longing to be alongside Dylan Graves, chasing tankers.

The skipper of the boat charter which delivers Graves to these waves describes the kick from tanker surfing as similar to crack cocaine.

Totally addictive, totally fucked, I think.