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Riding Giants
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Stacy Peralta
USA, France | 2004 | 105mins | 35mm | Colour
There's surfing, and then there's big-wave surfing.
Director Stacy Peralta leaves the concrete of his
critically acclaimed skate-board film Dogtown And
Z-Boys for the wild surf to present a semiserious,
multigenerational insider's look at the origins of
surfing, its colourful and subversive birth and the
mythology and lure of the "big wave". Mixing
narration by Sean Penn, interviews, archival clips
and spectacular cinematography, this offers a thrilling,
informative history of a sport-subculture.
We meet Greg Noll, the pioneer, whose relentless
push into Hawaii's "unridden realm" in the
1960s earned him the nick-name "The Bull".
Not only does his archival footage provide some of
the film's most impressive visuals, but his interviews
almost form a comedy reel of one-liners. Then there's
Jeff Clark, Northern California's lone frontiersman
who, after discovering the massive waves at Maverick's
near San Francisco, rode there alone for over a decade.
And finally Hawaii's Laird Hamilton, the prototypical
"extreme" surfer, a rare breed of athlete,
innovator considered the best big-wave rider who ever
waxed a board.
An instant classic of the genre - The Guardian
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Stronger Than Fear
Stärker Als Die Angst
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Ulrike Westermann
Germany | 2004 | 52mins | Beta | Colour | Subtitled
On an acre in southern Germany the body of a black
boy is discovered, 20 cm deep in the water-soaked
ground. Solomon Mforbei Fusi was a fifteen-year-old
from Bamenda, Cameroon. He was meant to take his destined
role within the family when he only wanted to be free
and independent. His dreams of a better life end in
the wheel of a plane. When the plane lands and the
wheels come out his body plunges into a German field.
The film follows Solomon's journey from Cameroon
to France to his final resting-place. In Bamenda the
people he was liv-ing with speak very openly about
him, but also about their own expectations, judgements
and morals. They draw up a contradictory picture of
Solomon and we gain a very personal view into an African
family. The impressions help to understand the pressure
that lasts on the younger African generation. On one
hand this generation is the social hope and perspective
of their families, on the other hand many young Africans
dream of a life as a free individual with the Western
culture as their ideal in mind.
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This Thing Happened
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Petra Conroy, Paul Fitzgerald
Ireland | 2004 | 54mins | Beta | Colour and Black
& White
On the night of 28th October 1927 a devastating storm
broke along the west coast of Ireland and raged for
two hours before subsiding as suddenly as it had stuck.
In its wake it left forty-five fishermen dead and
brought grief and terrible hardship to their families.
The testimony of the few survivors and that of their
relatives reveals the bravery of the men in the eye
of the storm, the agonising struggle to survive and
the final minutes and words of victims before they
were swept away. Entire communities were left almost
without men, forcing many of their dependants to emigrate
and leaving two villages abandoned and empty.
This Thing Happened is about these men and the loved
ones they left behind, and about the legacy of that
night which endures in the living memory of fishing
villages of Galway and Mayo to this day.
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