‘Splinters’: Surfing Can Take You to Another Country

“The surf is my church,” asserts Ezekial Afara. And so he worships daily, riding his surfboard into and over the waves off Vanimo Village in Papua New Guinea. So too, Angelus Lipahi devotes himself to the sport. “I want to be a professional like Kelly Slater,” he says. If he can manage this next giant step, he has in mind a glorious purpose, not only his own celebrity but, as well recognition for his village: “Then it can be recognized that we too have a good surfer here.”

Such piety provides a focus for Splinters. Adam Pesce’s film offers interviews with earnest surfers and their longsuffering mothers, as well as the sorts of picturesque images you’ve seen in other surfing documentaries, from The Endless Summer (1966) to Step Into Liquid (2003) to Riding Giants (2004). These reveal that the water in Papua New Guinea is beautiful blue, the sands stretch for miles, and the sunlight is bright. As the surfers start talking about the country’s first National Surfing Titles, you think you know where Splinters is headed — namely, the big competition. But first, some detours.

These have to do with families and traditions and poverty, all affected by surfing as they also affect surfing. Angelus brings the camera crew along into the “rough house” where serious surfers stay. It’s “for us hardcore guys,” he smiles, gesturing to holes in the walls and ceiling. “We’re too busy surfing to fix our house.” The hardcore guys have apparently descended from a single, maybe mythical, moment in time, when “in the 1980s,” a pilot left a surfboard on the island. Since then, though Vanimo Village has no paved roads and only 13% of adults have paying jobs, the surfers partake of the “infinite” perfect waves. They also contend with “politics.”

As Splinters reveals, the hardcore guys are affiliated with one of two associations, the Vanimo Surf Club or the breakaway Sunset Surf Club. Members of each vie for attention and reputation, and eye one another warily as they head to the beach. They also ponder the future, how surfing on an international stage might affect their lives. Their competition will decide which surfers from which club will go to Australia, where, they’ve heard, cities and traffic and television make surfing a different kind of enterprise.

Already, surfing has changed the ways the villagers see themselves. Lesley Umpa puts it, not so long ago, “It was beyond taboo if a woman went surfing. The tribal elders would call her back to the beach.” Now, she and her sister Susan are competing, both hoping to go to Australia. Lesley’s mother Robina notes, “Other girls Lesley’s age are already married,” but “she’s enjoying herself right now.” Lesley’s current independence stands in contrast to most other women in the village, who are typically bought by their husbands (because, one says, “My mother worked hard raising me”). The exchange isn’t always copacetic: “Once he buys her, he owns her. He can beat her whenever he wants.” It’s a longtime practice, she concludes, and she expects her daughters to participate in the same system.

Here the taboo Lesley describes regarding surfing takes on a set of other contexts, from men’s insecurities to women’s expectations. If women can be equals to men in surfing, if they might have practice schedules and win prizes and travel, how can men expect they will do as they’re told elsewhere, submit to beatings or rapes or other abuses? As Susan puts it, “Surfing changes your actions and ways. It can take you to another country.”

One step in that journey may be the construction of a new “surfers’ hotel,” which may, as one man puts it, usher in “what we call a new era.” But as they set to building, organizing, and training (such activities all shown in montages), they’re distracted, on occasion, by daily life. Ezekial looks to be partying too heavily, and Angelus admits, “I got another woman pregnant,” that is a woman who isn’t his wife. In addition, he owes alimony for two small boys he has with his wife; she’s waited — apparently patiently — until the eve of the surfing trials to contact the police. While Angelus suspects she’s been put up to this by the rival club’s leader, he still can’t find a way around it, and tries to keep out of sight even as he’s drawn to the trials, where everyone knows he can be found.

Around the same time, Susan arrives at the beach with her face bruised and swollen, the result of her husband’s abuse. Her mother reassures the camera, “I told her it’s a small thing, men are okay, but they’re fighters.” But Steve, the leader of Susan’s club, takes another tack, instructing his male members to rethink their assumptions. He means to put a woman in charge of equipment, to insure that women members get a chance to use surfboards the men regularly take first. “You surfers listen,” says Steve, “You must lose your bad attitude, you must interact with women, and treat them the same. Then they’ll respect you.” When the men protest (“The tradition says that the woman can’t give orders to a man. They’re always beneath us”), Steve comes up with an argument they can’t get around. “Some of you are dreaming of going to Australia. You have to change to see the outside world. You have to change.”

The point is not that the West — via that legendary first surfboard — has provided yet another backwards nation with a means to advance, and perhaps to change. Rather, Splinters offers a frame for other kinds of change as well (even change that might pertain to the US, in some spots inclined to restrict women’s health care and legal rights). In this frame, surfing is a way to “another country.”

RATING 7 / 10