Perry Gershkow will tell you surf films were at the top of the industry when the 21st Century began. I still can’t fully decide if the early 2000s were a lifetime away or just the blink of an eye, but in the context of what he’s saying, I lean toward that era feeling very, very far away.
That’s my perspective, I suppose. Gershkow and Noah Wegrich dedicated more than two years to give us theirs, creating a film that pays homage to those bygone days. While we’re all flooded with 15-second clips of barrels or weekly two-minute Youtube edits daily on the internet, ELUDE is a bona fide, 30-minute collection of waves found in seven different countries, following Wegrich, Nate Tyler, Nat Young, Gearoid Mcdaid, Conor Mcguire, Jake Kelley, Colin Moran, Michael Taras, and Robin Caddell. To call it a throwback feels more than appropriate.
“I wanted people to not only be visually encapsulated, but I wanted people to be taking through a linear story where every section leads to the next, and by the end it’s gone full circle,” he says. “We wanted a certain look with the film, and the only way to achieve that was to travel to places that offered beautiful, dramatic scenery. It’s an ode to the films made in the early 2000s.”
Gershkow says the project started with one idea that grew into others, and that flow led them around the world. That in itself feels like a bit of a lost art, where most of the footage we see packaged today is a quick glimpse at one place in time. Instead, the filmmaker pieced something together that does feel like those days of sitting down to watch a surf flick in its entirety, often walking away with an itch to visit the places you just saw or, at the very least, an intense urge to go jump in the water.
