Years and years ago, when I was in college taking a Communications course, one of my professors asked all of us students to show the rest of a class a short film that moved us. It was a few months before I really started working in the surf industry proper, just before I got an internship at Surfer Magazine that led to this plush little gig, and I picked Dark Side of the Lens, a film by Mickey Smith and Allan Wilson.
I still think it’s one of the most beautifully made surf films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few over the course of the years. Smith and Wilson enjoyed a few solid months of relative surf film fame, but then kind of quietly slipped into the background. Of course, they didn’t really stop (Smith, in fact, made another short film film in 2014). They just focussed their artistic talents in other directions. But now, all these years later, they’ve done it again.
Hunros Jorna is Smith and Wilson’s latest offering, and it’s an odd one — in the best possible way. There’s a language in Cornwall called Kernewek, and only around 2,000 people are really fluent in it. The narration of the film is all Kernewek, and the soundtrack was provided by Smith’s band, A Blaze of Feather.
It’s nearly 20 minutes of beautifully crafted vignettes from Kernow and up to Ireland, and if I was still in school today, this is what I’d show my classmates.
