Surf City Stoke

Perhaps the biggest pleasure about putting on screenings of surf films is watching the reaction of audiences to moments you've already seen. I always get a kick when people hoot or gasp at those sublime bursts of wave magic, or laugh at another whacky wipeout. It's even fun to hear those murmurs of derision or dislike at the spurious arrogance of some people in the movies. I commiserate when sadness turns to the immaculate silence of soulful introspection.

On the beach at the Bay of Plenty there was plenty of hoots and laughter as almost 2,000 Durbanites descended on the lawns to watch four films. As part of the Durban International Film Festival, we were proud to have carefully curated a mixture of genres to try and stoke everyone.

The outdoor screening appeals to a family setup, so you need something for everyone. We had Disguised in Nature, featuring the talents of Bianca Buitendag and Joanne Defay, followed by the electric air show of Jordy Smith in Now Now. The soulful meander of Russia, a surf trip to a remote coast, was capped with the eclectic mix of surf vignettes produced by surfers around the world in Taylor Steele's Innersection Black.

I nervously awaited the outcome of audience reaction to Russia. The slow soul of the film was boosted by languid but stunning landscape shots. The surf was small, but it wasn't about that. Afterwards, three out of four people who came up to say hi mentioned how much they enjoyed it. Phew.

While you can't please everyone all the time, you can please them big time some of the time. That is one of the biggest learnings in the art of surf film curation.

Next it was on to Musgrave, where we hosted five days of 6pm and 8pm screenings at Ster Kinekor's number 6 cine. This year, we had the incredible talents of a crew of Dutch projectionists brought out by DIFF to ensure high quality and seamless production.

It made a huge difference. Another learning was that the DVD is dead. Long live the digital age, viva! They dismantled each DVD and reconstituted the digital information into a higher resolution file at better compression, playing it through a specialist digital media player. They would take the sound, strip out the channels, and render it into 5.1 Dolby surround sound.

No more silly DVD menus. No more delays. And a much richer and more visceral cinematic experience. I don't know if anyone noticed, but the screenings were so much better.

Many of the 6pm shows were packed out, and both screenings did well on the closing night. The 8pm shows were kinda slow. Durban surfers like to get to bed early to wake up for the dawnie, I guess. Another learning.

And get up I did for four dawnies in a row, which was just as well. Unusually good sand banks have characterised the point breaks on the South Coast, occasionally bringing waves of sublime shape and form.

At one empty Zulu pointbreak, sitting 200 metres down the line, I could see into the gaping maw of each roiling coil as it spun like a spurting hosepipe along rocks and sand, spitting spray like a marine mamba. I watched guys fly through impossibly long tubes that seemed to go on forever.

At various times, we sat amongst a school of playful dolphins who didn’t seem in a hurry to move on. They milled all around us. Then I realised. They also knew how perfect the banks are. They would wait for a set wave, and as it walled transculently over the clear sand, they would ride it, sometimes straight at you. We saw a turtle sunning itself, and even a yellowfin tuna that kept jumping out of the water in pursuit of darting schools of narrow silver fish.

We debated the reason for the good banks. A lack of winter rain? When heavy rains fall inland, the rivers become engorged, surging powerfully into the sea. The makeup of the East Coast is a repetitive combination of point, river mouth, and beach. A river often exits at the base of the point, which gouges out the sand that has built up along the rocks.

In summer, the NE onshores blow, and inshore currents pull the sand from the breaks. Combined with heavy rains, its tickets for wave quality.

In winter, big clean south swells roll up the coast from the roaring forties, pushing the sand from the wildside spots around to the points. Groundswell tends to create sand banks when it breaks, the deeper energy pushing the sand forwards with more power then they pull back. The sand makes the waves break a little further out, and it makes them run for longer.

All I know is that after each screening, every morning at dawn, the cool offshores blew, and at about 9am every day, they died. The sea turned smooth, and the waves slid towards you like tinted blue glass.

Get to your feet fast enough, and the bottle shatters in fragments of foam that dissolve behind you. The big screen came to life.