This Friday, the Arlington Theatre plays host to the Save the Waves Film Festival. Born in San Francisco, the festival makes its first tour this year. (S.B. is the inaugural stop on a three-city jaunt.) In addition to surf-minded movies, attendees can expect beer, live music from the likes of Tom Curren and Todd Hannigan, and a courtyard full of eco-oriented nonprofit groups looking to spread their ocean-loving gospel. Even better, the whole hootenanny is a fundraiser for Save the Waves, an international organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the most endangered surf zones on the planet. The party starts this Friday, November 2, at 6 p.m. Visit savethewaves.org/filmfestival for tickets and info.
1. The U.S. Premiere of Groundswell: Heaps of pristine Canadian coastline are in line to get a rather earth-destroying makeover thanks to the tar sands oil pipeline project, a $5.5-billion plan to pump more than half a million barrels of crude oil a day from Edmonton to British Columbia. Celebrated surf film maker Chris Malloy and friends took a sailboat around the Great Bear Rainforest of B.C. last fall, and what they found is nothing short of stunning. The resulting 25-minute film is a beautiful and surf-stacked environmental call to arms.
2. The Fight Against Fracking: The first part of Friday’s festival includes a series of short films, like Montecitan Branden Aroyan’s mini-documentary about one young man’s epic efforts to call attention to the dangers associated with hydraulic fracturing (a controversial oil-extraction technique) along the Central California coast. This past summer, Aroyan shadowed S.B.’s own Chadd Konig as he paddled the gnarled and wild coast between Santa Cruz and northern Santa Barbara County, tracing the Monterey Shale that oil harvesters hope to pillage. As you can imagine, major adventure ensues.
3. Trevor Gordon: Raised on the Mesa, Trevor Gordon has been one of the young lions of the Santa Barbara style brigade for a while now. His Curren-esque lines and generally cool approach to riding long, reeling lumps of moving ocean is helping set the bar for what proper flow looks like these days. He’s also a recent addition to the Patagonia family and one of the on-screen talents in Groundswell.
4. Ode: Patrick Trefz is a hyper-talented and largely under-the-radar artist from Santa Cruz who hangs out in some of the most deeply rooted and thoughtful seams of surf culture. From this vantage point, he takes pictures, puts out books, rides surf sleds with marked skill, dabbles in spontaneous sorts of open-air art, and makes the occasional poetic and gritty surf movie. Ode is the most recent of the latter, and it premieres as part of the festival.