Chasing the waves

Surfwise is a fantastic documentary
about passion, family and longboards

by CHRISTOPHER SYKES

Every once in a while, a film sinks its claws in and leaves you asking questions about your own choices in life. That’s the beauty of a really good documentary; it can floor you in ways a fictional representation can’t.

Directed by Doug Pray, who did the superb counterculture docs Scratch and Hype!, Surfwise is the story of surfing’s most famous family, the Paskowitzes. A Stanford graduate in medicine, Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz was set for a life of comfort as part of the brain trust of America. By his early 30s, Paskowitz was already president of the American Medical Association in Hawaii and being groomed for a position in public office.

He looks back at these days as the worst of his life. The deeply religious Doc left his practice and set off on a soul search that took him to his beloved Israel before relocating back to California. Yearning to live off the land instead of filling his pockets, he became an integral figure in establishing and popularizing America’s surf scene.

Surfwise is divided with great precision into three acts; the first is an explanation of the surf world’s near-canonization of free-thinking Doc Paskowitz as the man who chose to follow the waves, raising his nine children with wife Juliette in a 24-foot camper. While you can’t help but be enthralled by their life stories, around the half-hour mark, Pray begins to drop hints that all is not right with the now 86-year-old Dr. Dorian. Through extensive discussions with the nine kids, it becomes apparent this is a man who ruled with an iron fist, and the family has been split apart for the better part of a decade.

But blood is thicker than salt water. No doubt as a direct result of the film itself, the Paskowitzes set aside their differences and reunite in Hawaii in an attempt to mend ties long ago broken. Pray captures the tense reunion at the twilight of Doc’s life and is neither exploitative nor voyeuristic; he’s simply there. And we’re lucky that he was.

Surfwise opens this
Friday, July 18

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