Most surf films nowadays seem to be aerial fuelled slash and burn shortboarding binges. The odd film – take for example those of the filmmaker Nathan Oldfield – celebrates the authentic heart of surfing, featuring impossibly smooth soulful surfers such as Beau Young or Johnny Abegg. It is rare that an alternative surf film comes along that fits into neither of these categories at all.

Todd Stewart’s short film called “The Surf Magazines Don’t Talk About Lapsed Catholics” is dark, unremitting and refreshingly honest. He covers an angle of surfing that is never covered in the glossy surf magazines. The grainy existential footage is full of despair and highlights the humiliation a surfer feels when he leaves his carefree days of his youth and enters a comfort zone away from the ocean (think of a London office). Although at 5 minutes long it is still difficult to watch, he picks up on brilliant details, such as entering a lineup of your once homebreak and being able to speak about surfing, boards and breaks with the correct language to make the locals believe that you are still a surfer. They may be fooled by the appearance, but you are not.

Does the short film act as a call to arms to fight existential inertia and get back to the water and authentic life? It is hard to say and I don’t think Todd Stewart is really pushing a moral message, even if indirectly it does encourage you to get to the water more regularly. As an aside, the link between Catholicism and surfing that is highlighted in the title makes me think of the GK Chesterton quotation used by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisted. The character Cordelia recalls the image of Father Brown to illustrate the nature of grace: “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread”. Even if the surf magazines don’t talk about lapsed Catholics, the parallel between surf and religion remains an interesting one.

Watch the video here:

Visit Todd Stewart’s website here: www.lapsedcatholics.com