This Is About More Than Just Surfing

Camp4 Collective’s Surfer Dan isn’t really a film about surfing, it’s about more than that.

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At one point in the film Dan, clad in a heavy wetsuit and carrying a longboard, runs past red hazard signs and onto a frozen jetty resembling a horizontal icicle more than anything else. He’s screaming something into the wind; barely picked up by the microphones recording him. He looks into the churning, dreadful, ice bath before him, points at the water, and then gives a fist pump as he yells “YEAA! Look at that shit!” We can’t see the swells that Surfer Dan is so excited by, they’re simply not the point. Surfer Dan isn’t a film about beautiful waves or exotic locales, it’s about a man so in love with surfing that he bubbles with boyish glee as he jumps into a painful, frozen lake.