Women shred stereotypes at Surf Film Fest

Whether you’re a crowd-fearing summer grumpster like me or not, a perfect place to chill is the air-conditioned Doris Duke Theatre, where the 10th annual Surf Film Festival is playing for a month.

In addition to the usual hot spots, it shows films set in cold-water places such as Iceland, Canada, the San Francisco Bay Area and northern France, whose stark, rugged beauty is a bracing tonic to the islands’ summer heat, humidity and tropical blues.

“The big cliffs give this area a look that’s a bit mystical,” says Annabel, an artist who lives in Finistere, a village on the northwestern tip of France. She and two other surfer Bretonnes (women of Brittany) speak about their lives and surf gray beach breaks in “Lettre a Ma Mer (Letter to My Ocean),” a reflective, gliding, 40-minute documentary by first-time filmmaker Megane Murgia.

Murgia shows how the rhythms of waves and tides shape the women’s day-to-day lives with family and work. She brings us inside a community where the surfers have roots, rather than visiting exotic destinations in the way of the usual surf film.

The viewer grows to appreciate the subtle beauty and seasons of this foggy coast.

“The countryside is magnificent and very wild,” Murgia wrote in an email. “I wanted to film the surfeuses (female surfers) whom I’ve met in the waves and to show all the colors the ocean offers us, from blue-gray to green, throughout a year.”

Along with Mark Gunson’s “Great Highway,” a 90-minute documentary in which surfers of all ages enact the story of Northern California surfing from the 1940s to today, it resonates and charms with more grit than glam.

Of course, audiences at this summer’s festival will also enjoy living vicariously through laid-back travelogues like Bruce Brown’s “The Endless Summer” (1966) and thrill to Taylor Steele’s “Proximity” (2017), which uses all the latest, high-tech underwater and aerial cinematography to capture the superhuman skills of John Florence, Shane Dorian, Kelly Slater, Stephanie Gilmore and others in far-flung waves of jaw-dropping size and shape.

It must be noted that one thing that hasn’t traveled well about “The Endless Summer” is the cringe-worthy tone it adopts toward non-Westerners. It sounds like the too-chatty stranger whom I told to get lost when I was 16 and surfing Waikiki. (“But you speak such good English!” he exclaimed.)

Cultural and gender stereotypes are examined in “Surf Like a Girl,” the festival’s grouping of “Lettre a Ma Mer” and seven other shorter films by and about women. “Pear Shaped,” Australian surfer Lauren Hill’s very funny film, is filled with no-holds-barred slapstick moments that ridicule the pressures on female surfers to look flawlessly groomed and model-thin while performing on challenging waves.

In addition to a body with narrow shoulders and wide hips, “pear-shaped” in Australia means something’s gone wrong: Hill curses the inventor of the bikini as she experiences mishaps with hers.

Then there are the tense moments the three Bretonne surfeuses describe, of paddling into a lineup where there are only male strangers and feeling a hostility.

“They want to break you because you are a girl,” one of them says.

Strong language? Yes. But I’ve felt what they describe, the importance of doing well on the first wave you take so you won’t be bullied by paddle-arounds and blocking.

“I hope that ‘les surfeuses Hawaiennes’ will recognize themselves in what ‘les surfeuses Bretonnes’ have tried to share,” Murgia wrote.

I already have. For all surfers the sea is our universal mother. While we may at times be a fractious family, still, we are one.

“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.