May 04, 2015
File Art /for PhillyVoice
Surfing is a sport that pairs adventurously coordinated souls with some of the most powerful forces in nature.
Dancing on the ocean's waves is no easy feat (trust me, I've tried). And neither is saving the world's fragile coastlines.
Surfing is a sport that pairs adventurously coordinated souls with some of the most powerful forces in nature. A new film documenting the life of a well-known professional surfer aims to share a new conservation method through a shared love of the sport.
"The Fisherman's Son," created by filmmaker and surfer Chris Malloy in partnership with Patagonia, tells the story of Chilean big-wave surfer-come-conservationist Ramón Navarro.
"Just like all the stuff that I work on, it’s experiential," Malloy told The Daily Beast. "It was a 10-year relationship with Chile and Ramón, watching him grow and becoming really inspired by him, and being blown away with his unlikely trajectory."
Navarro grew up in rural Chile in a town called Punta de Lobos, where he mastered his passion for surfing.
Working with the Save the Waves organization and one of his sponsors, Patagonia, he is rallying people to the cause of making Punta de Lobos a World Surfing Reserve, forever protected from the sort of environmental fallout that has plagued so much of our world’s coasts.
"He had a great upbringing, but in a subsistence fishing family in a place where surfing was just beginning," Malloy told The Daily Beast.
"The idea of him becoming what he’s become, one of the top 10 big-wave surfers in the world – it’s incredible. And because of his travels, he’s realized that where he’s from, that whole Chilean coastline, is as beautiful as anything in California. And he realizes that he’s in California 150 years ago, and if these places and these people aren’t given a voice, or if there’s not somebody to hold the developers accountable, then it's gonna look like Laguna Beach. He’s the voice of the Chilean coastline."
Read Malloy's full interview with The Daily Beast here.
