THE BLIND SEA
Written and directed by Daniel Fenech
TOWARDS THE END of Daniel Fenech’s film tracing the efforts of blind athlete Matt Formston to surf the giant waves of Nazare, in Portugal, the soundtrack suddenly became simple. All I could hear, over and over, was someone saying “holy shit”.
Sometimes with shock and awe, “HOLY shit”; sometimes with fear, “holy SHIT”; sometimes with pure wonder, “Hooolllly shiiiiit.”. Like some incoherent fool, gobsmacked and arse-slapped.
Don’t blame Fenech, or Formston, it was me. A man who can barely stand upright on solid ground and who would no more be able to surf a tiddler of a wave than play a Haydn concerto and who never smoked enough dope to really get excited by Morning Of The Earth. A man rendered pretty inarticulate watching the scale and terrifying splendour of those stupendous waves – filmed by a number of camera operators under director of photography, Chris Bland – and the ridiculously small figures of people on boards, on jetskis, on a hope and a prayer, set against them.
Waves that rear up like dragons cresting the horizon and seemingly expanding as they come closer, coming down in remorseless, relentless energy drives that brook no argument, then crashing like explosions, seismic and final. As we scientific people refer to them, monster bloody waves.
And people surf that. Matt Formston is surfing that. Did I mention he is blind? Macular dystrophy has left him able to see a small ring of the world around a large block of darkness (like holding your fists in front of your eyes, someone explains), and when he up on the board he is surfing by feel. Holy shit.
We meet Formston at the beginning of the film on Pismo Beach, California, competing at the 2021 Para Surfing world championship, competitors with a range of disabilities in different classifications but surfing the same course. Formston, who, of course, is a Paralympian – a gold medal-winning cyclist and world record holder – is also a three-times surfing champion in the VA 2 category, aiming for his fourth title in California.
Fenech makes little fuss about this event, where Formston is not the only Australian (Sam Bloom, two-time world champion in the Prone 1 classification is another. She’s older than many of the others but properly gnarly) and not the biggest story. The waves are small and so is the time, for this is a palate cleanser for the main event, the long preparation for Nazare,
In some ways the film then becomes something of an extended Australian Story: Formston’s childhood (full of sport and “lively, hard to stop” defiance of an ophthalmic professor who said his life effectively was over at 5), married life (with the sanguine Rebecca and their three children), and groundbreaking work in diversity and inclusion with Optus (oh hello found-to-be-corrupt-former-premier Gladys Berejiklian) explained with humour and obvious respect from anyone he encounters.
There are the appropriate beats of resilience, small moments of recriminations, and the reactions of strangers and family to times when they, like us, wonder if this man riding his bike around the suburb with the kids, fixing things in the garden, being a totally regular bloke, really is impaired, or maybe is some freak of science/nature with spidey senses beyond the mental map he makes of any environment he is in.
Put it this way, I half expected him to get behind the wheel of a car at some point and drive it, blind, and drive it, well.
Eventually though we arrive in Portugal and The Blind Sea expands, even as the weather closes in, the time ebbs away and the fears – ours, mostly, but maybe a few, just a few for him – gnaw away at the edges. Justifiable fears by the way. Where there’s “a mountain of water moving towards you and its primary objective is to get to the beach as fast as it can. If you get in its way it will kill you,” is how multiple world champion surfer Layne Bleachley describes it, before adding: “I wish you well mate … I want nothing to do with that.”
Oh, but Formston does.
The Blind Sea is screening now
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