Heavy Water Premiere this Sunday
Tuesday 17 July 2018 If you're in Durban, pull in this Sunday evening to the Bay of Plenty to experience the African premiere of Heavy Water, the Nathan Fletcher movie, and meet the director. This movie is insane!

HEAVY BRU: Nathan Fletcher is one of those enigmatic people who attract drama. Photo supplied

Our headline and opening film at the 14th Wavescape Surf Film Festival at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) is the hit feature documentary Heavy Water: The Life and Times of Nathan Fletcher. Red Bull are flying out the US-based Director Michael Oblowitz (he is South African and he surfs) for the premiere.
Oblowitz was born in Cape Town and holds an MA in Film from Columbia University. He has built up an impressive list of credentials after leaving SA to escape apartheid in 1976. He is good mates with Kathryn Bigelow, the first female to win an Academy Award, and in New York was a pioneer of the Indie film-making movement as outlined in the documentary Blank Generation.
His early films are in the permanent collection of the Museum Of Modern Art, New York City, and he has won multiple awards or entries to top festivals, such as Cannes, Sundance and the New York International Film & Video Festival where The Traveler (2010), with Val Kilmer, won Best Thriller. Actors such as Steven Seagal (The Foreigner, 2003, and Out for a Kill, 2003) and William Forsythe (SharkMan, 2005), have starred in his films. He also produced music videos with the likes of David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Diana Ross, Carly Simon, Carole King, and Carlos Santana.
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Surfers will know him for his documentary film, Sea Of Darkness, 2010, which won best film at Byron Bay International Film Festival, San Sebastien Surf Film Festival, X- Dance Festival at Sundance, New York Surf Film Festival and the Wavescape Surf Film Festival in Cape Town.
Heavy Water is one of 21 films Wavescape brings to Durban this year, including features and shorts from Sierra Leone, Namibia, South Africa, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Australia, Hawaii, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others. Wavescape Director Steve Pike, aka Spike, says that the lineup for DIFF was one of the most exciting in years. “We’re honoured to have another African premiere – the gritty documentary Secrets of Desert Point, a piece of pioneering surf history.”
Heavy Water promises an entertaining night out at the Bay of Plenty. According to a review: It’s a feature doccie, but views like an action film, while covering big wave legend Nathan Fletcher's relationships with the colourful, gritty characters of Hawaii’s North Shore. Fletcher enacts a dream to jump from a helicopter with a surfboard onto a giant wave, and surf it. Oblowitz says: “He’s the only guy that’s been able to successfully do it – and he pulls it off. It’s mind blowing.”
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From Monday 23 to Friday 27 July, Wavescape moves to Arena 5, Village Walk, uShaka Marine for five 6pm screenings, which are free. The screenings at uShaka open with a lineup of three short films and two features, the soulful Perilous Sea and Church of the Open Sky, a master piece of surf filmmaking by Australian director Nathan Oldfield.
Wavescape also screens the documentary Secrets Of Desert Point, an excellent piece of historical story telling by Director Ira Opper, who chronicles the story of how a young Californian and his friends stumble across a perfect wave in the early 1980s from leaky boats among the remote islands of Indonesia, but it was fraught with dangers, from drugs to pirates and deadly coral reefs.

I AM AFRICAN: This soulful Moroccan film takes us all the way down to Namibia. Photo supplied
Spike says there are also excellent films about travel – the quest for reach for something precious, like I am African, about the soulful travels of a Moroccan who brings clean water to the poor communities of Africa while working his way towards the infamous waves of Skeleton Bay in Namibia. The Seawolf is pure surf soul as we follow “eight surfers on a two-year journey to remote places to find the most dangerous waves on terrifyingly shallow rock slabs. Filmed in high definition 4k on Red Cameras, this is a enriching viewing experience”.Download PDF flyer
Several films tackle the emotional side of the human condition, such as Finding Purpose, a short film about Durban big wave surfer Tammy-Lee Smith who finds purpose riding big waves after pain and loss. A Million Waves tells the story of Kadiatu Kamara, 19, who is left to face the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone alone after her dad dies. She finds hope surfing in the waves.
In Visit, we travel with a shy, former street kid from Durban on his trip to England to visit the land of the funders who saved him from disappearing down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole. There is Adam, an award-winning short film about a Cape Town surfer diagnosed with a chronic form of cancer; or Awen, in which we see the uncomfortable reality of a young Chinese man who clashes with his mother because she wants him to be a fisherman like his ancestors, but he just wants to surf.

SEA LONE: In this fluid film we follow these stylish females on a logging trip. Photo supplied
However, beyond the pain of being human come films to celebrate the visual poetry of the natural world, and the spiritual enrichment that the act of surfing and being in the ocean brings. Sea Lone eulogises some of the world’s top women longboarders on a surf trip to Sri Lanka.
Shape Qui Rit is a cute short about a two year old girl who “shapes” her dream surfboard; Night Rose sees an elderly lady in England transported by a vision into the ocean for a night surf; Black Rain catches a session in the tropics that cracks with the sea surface chatter of a thunderstorm, while The Edge Of North follows top British surfers to Scotland for a surf trip on the doorstep of home.
All Wavescape Ocean Festival films are free. The opening screening takes place on July 22 at Bay of Plenty lawns at 7pm – bring picnics, blankets and chairs. The rest of the programme takes place at Village Walk, uShaka Marine World at 6pm daily from Monday 23 to Friday 27 July.
For more information follow DIFF on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or go to www.durbanfilmfest.co.za or go to www.wavescapefestival.com