Film Los Buscagigantes by director Rodrigo Farias. Two important names of Chilean surfing — Ramon Navarro and Cristian Merello — together with Uti, a local of Isla de Pascua, on an epic session which is told to be the best wave of Rapa Nui. Photo: Facebook
Xabi sits opposite me on the second floor of a paint-peeling dive bar in San Sebastián. He is the owner and founder of one of Basque Country’s most revered indie fashion labels, Loreak Mendian, as well an avid consumer of culture and a longboarder since the age of 20. All in all he represents the exact archetype of the sophisticated Basque surfer and is today opining on the challenges the coming generation of surfers confront.
“This big corporate surfing thing has not been good for making and creating identities,” he says. “In one way it is a way of cultural imperialism. This is the surf culture, you know. The clothes, the boards, the stickers, the things you drink.
“It is important for the young kids to see that there are different kinds of surfers and other things in life than surfing… it is very important to have characters like Sancho.”
Sancho Rodriguez is the other founder and director of the San Sebastian Film Festibal. His festival, now in its thirteenth year, will take place between the June 24 to 28, and will, as it does every year, aim to bring together every side of surfing in Europe’s most famous surf city, San Sebastián, a short drive from Mundaka in Basque Country. There will be art, there will be films, and there will be performance — all of which will tackle a range of issues from the environment, activism, the limits of aquatic athleticism, the limits of creativity, the limits of adventure and anything else that’s been inspired by our eclectic oceanic pursuit.
San Sebastián. Photo: Anna Morgan
“Expect any kind of anonymous story that at the end is really universal,” Rodriguez says. “It is my job to give credibility to culture and expose the work of artists. In surfing, filmmakers, photographers and writers are always left behind. It’s the big sportsman who get all the credit. Someone who tells the story well is an artist. This (film festival) is to give credit to the person who tells stories well. Surfing is like an indie music festival with so many different genres and for sure some of those are under represented.”
Along with the high culture there’s also some plain old good times via what is all be reports a very debauched party scene.
“It’s a triumph of moving pictures, non-corporate hospitality with the riotous, party instincts of the Basque people, the artistic credentials of a Gertrude Stein dinner party with Man Ray, and positive, shittiness-less vibrations that can oft blight surfie gatherings,” adds Paul Evans, former editor of Surf Europe.
Another magazine editor of international renown, who wished to remain nameless, remembers a festival that got off to a slow start before: “I was surrounded by a pack of coke fiends on a dance floor, all scooping credit card loads of juice into their holes by the third night. Sleep became optional and when the week climaxed and we were told to leave, I cried like a girl.”
“We claim our grimy party scene,” says Sancho. “Surfing is about being free and letting yourself go. It is not a puritan sport.”
He is also known to eschew corporate funding to ensure he maintains complete creative control over the event. But with Spain teetering on the edge of financial cataclysm, as it has for the past four years, he has partnered with several big brands this year and is proud to say there has been zero interference.
“The way I work I am used to marketing with no money but this year we have partnered up with some bigger brands and they all let us do what we want,” he says. “They respect our vision and don’t interfere with the artistic program.”
With the backing of one of Europe’s most prestigious film commissions, the San Sebastian film commission (part of the same circuit as Cannes), the San Sebastián Surfilm Festibal has brought compiled a typically eccentric program this year, including the exhibition, Surf, Architecture and Urbanism at the famed Okendo Culture House along with a collection of work dedicated to the dire sand-stripping situation at Mundaka, and several more events which will be announced in the coming weeks.
Among the highlights, says Sancho, will be a collection of work by the heralded Japanese artist/surfer collective, JapaNing, all of whom have suffered badly at the hands of the Fukushima disaster.
“Their focus is to break away from the dominant iconography of the surfing world, imparting a philosophical message of respect for the cycle of nature above and beyond our search for the next wave,” explains Sancho, via the festival’s website.
Or as Kurando Shoji, producer of JapaNing, puts it: “All the artists taking part in the project have a different look to the world, a delicate sensibility they use to solve personal and social situations in which each of them are specialists.”
With Chile as the guest country this year, the legendary underground Chilean big wave surfer Ramon Navarro will turn out to present the heralded feature documentary charting his life of big wave achievements and environmental activism, titled Son of the Fisherman.
It’s also worth noting that the festival is entirely put together by the local surfing community who, according to Sancho, “receive surf culture from everywhere in the world but claim so much from here. A festival that is here definitely claims our identity.”
For reasons he can’t figure out, the San Sebastian Surf Film Festibal has never generated much noise in the mainstream surfing community. But that might be a good thing anyway.
“People don’t realize what’s happening here,” Sancho concludes. “It’s really hard to transmit…We don’t have all the riders here, we don’t have all the media here because the underground is not at the forefront of surf culture anymore.”
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