Waimea Ocean Film Festival 2018

Lissette and I give each other for Christmas a 4 day pass to the Waimea Ocean Film Festival which for us is the best gift of all-incredible sights and sounds of our ocean. The films are shown in multi venues including the Fairmont Orchid in the Mauna Lani Resort, very close to our home. Most films, but not all, are related to the ocean and are video masterpieces. The films vary in length from 5 minutes to full length documentaries that are often only published for promotional purposes by their sponsors like Red Bull, Ford or Tag Heuer. As an example we saw a Ford sponsored movie that highlighted surfers searching for the next XXL wave site featuring big wave surfer Andrew Cotton. We saw a full length feature called The Big Wave Project with 90 minutes of some of the largest big waves ever surfed in locations like Peahi, Maui (Jaws), Nazare, Portugal and Waimea Bay, Oahu.

Often these documentaries include a question and answer session with either the films featured surfer or other person involved like the film’s producer, camera person or others. We’ve had the good fortune to meet big wave surfers Garrett McNamara, Mark Healy, Andrew Cotton, Chris Bertish and many others in past years. Our impression of the Big Wave surfers is-wow-they are shorter and smaller than they appear in the films. Mark Healy phrased it eloquently in a Q and A, “Huge Wave+small guy on the board+ near death experience=GREAT MOVIE:)” Mark added that watching competitive surfing is too complicated and sometimes not as exciting therefore “big wave” surf events will always be a great venue for movies and tv alike. I would agree!

Some of these movies can be found on YouTube or by searching the internet so check out the attached pdf file for this year’s guide and read on for some of the best movies we’ve seen lately.

Our favorites this year were: