Between the Surfs: Life in an Indonesian Surf Town When You’re Not Actually Surfing

When people think about surf towns, they usually picture the obvious things.

Perfect waves. Boards under arms. Bare feet. Salt in your hair. Someone checking the forecast every five minutes.

And yes, there is a lot of that.

But some of my favourite parts of living around surfing happen when nobody is actually surfing.

That is what my short film Between the Surfs is about.

It is about the space between sessions.

The waiting. The coffee. The scooters. The conversations. The people sitting around doing absolutely nothing and somehow making it feel like the most important part of the day.

It is about all the little moments that make surf-town life feel like surf-town life.

Watch Between the Surfs on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/QeJ1QQ_A3_c

What happens between surf sessions?

A lot more than you would think.

Surfing might structure the day, but it rarely takes up the whole day.

There is the coffee before the first surf.

The conversation afterwards where everyone somehow remembers their own wave as being slightly better than it actually was.

There is checking the tide.

Waiting for the wind.

Sitting around because somebody said the waves might improve in an hour.

Going somewhere for food and accidentally staying there all afternoon.

There are scooters everywhere.

Boards everywhere.

People coming and going.

Someone is always filming something. Someone is always fixing something. Someone is always talking about surfing even though they just got out of the water twenty minutes ago.

And then there are the completely unrelated moments.

Friends laughing.

Coconuts on the side of the road.

Music.

Smoking outside.

Someone taking photos.

Someone else doing something ridiculous in the background.

None of it sounds particularly important when you list it out.

But together, that is the life.

Why I made Between the Surfs

I wanted to make something that did not focus on the actual surf.

There are already so many beautiful surf films about waves, progression and performance.

But when I think about the periods of my life that have revolved around surfing, I do not only remember the waves.

I remember everything around them.

The people.

The places we sat.

The stupid conversations.

The last-minute plans.

The way everyone somehow knows where everyone else is without actually making a plan.

The feeling of having nowhere particularly urgent to be.

That is what I wanted to capture.

Not a surf edit.

More like a memory.

Filming it on my mini Kodak camera

A big part of the look of Between the Surfs came from the camera I used.

I filmed a lot of it on my mini Kodak camera because I wanted it to feel like old footage you rediscover years later.

Not overly polished.

Not cinematic in a perfect way.

A little grainy.

A little imperfect.

A little chaotic.

Almost like an old home video or an early digital camera you would have carried around with your friends without thinking too much about what you were filming.

That was important to me because the film is really about memory.

I did not want it to feel like I was documenting surf-town life from the outside.

I wanted it to feel like you had found a camera that had been passed around between friends for a few weeks.

Little clips.

Random faces.

Someone laughing.

Someone looking into the lens.

A coconut.

A scooter.

Nothing staged enough to feel important.

And somehow, all of it becomes important later.

Life in a surf town in Indonesia

There is a particular rhythm to living in a surf town in Indonesia.

The ocean decides more of your schedule than you probably realise.

Someone asks what you are doing later and the real answer is usually:

“Depends on the waves.”

Plans happen around tides.

Work gets squeezed between sessions.

Lunch might be at eleven or three.

Dinner could turn into drinks.

A quick coffee can become two hours because three more people arrive.

And the people around you become part of your routine incredibly quickly.

You keep seeing the same faces.

At the surf.

At the same cafés.

On scooters.

Sitting under the same trees.

You start having conversations with people you might never have met anywhere else.

That is one of the things I love most about surf towns.

Surfing brings people into the same place, but eventually the friendships have very little to do with surfing.

Surfing is only part of the story

Surfing is still the reason a lot of these moments exist.

It is the thing that brings people to the same coastline.

It is the reason everyone wakes up early.

It gives the day its structure.

But I think the longer you spend in a surf community, the more you realise the actual surfing is only one part of it.

You might remember an amazing wave.

But you also remember who was sitting beside you afterwards.

You remember the person who filmed it.

You remember riding home.

You remember everyone laughing about what happened.

You remember what you ate afterwards.

You remember the music that was playing that night.

Eventually, those tiny things become the memory of the place.

Why the imperfect footage mattered

There is something strange about how much effort we put into making our lives look polished now.

Perfect light.

Perfect angles.

Perfect edits.

Perfect moments.

But real memories do not look like that.

They are blurry.

People walk through the frame.

Someone looks terrible.

Someone says something stupid.

The camera moves too quickly.

Half the time you are not even sure why somebody started recording.

That is exactly the feeling I wanted for this film.

The mini Kodak camera gave the footage this slightly old, nostalgic look that made everything feel less like content and more like something personal.

And I think that suits surf-town life.

Because some of the best moments are not the ones anyone planned to film.

The friendships between the surfs

Surfing can be strangely individual.

When you are actually on a wave, it is just you.

But everything surrounding surfing can be incredibly social.

You wait together.

You watch each other.

You tell stories.

You laugh at each other's wipeouts.

You complain about the crowd.

You celebrate when somebody gets a good wave.

Then you go back to shore and continue hanging out as though none of you have anywhere else to be.

Those friendships are a huge part of Between the Surfs.

Not because I wanted to make a film specifically about friendship.

But because when I started filming the things that happened between sessions, friendship was everywhere.

Maybe the in-between is the best part

We spend so much of our lives waiting for the main event.

The trip.

The wave.

The weekend.

The party.

The big moment.

But I think the older I get, the more I realise life mostly happens between those things.

It is the drive there.

The coffee beforehand.

The people you waited with.

The conversation that lasted too long.

The five minutes somebody randomly decided to film.

That is what Between the Surfs became for me.

A small collection of moments that probably did not feel particularly important while they were happening.

But together, they say more about that period of my life than a perfect surf montage ever could.

Watch Between the Surfs

Between the Surfs is a short surf lifestyle film about everything that happens around surfing rather than on the wave itself.

Shot partly on a mini Kodak camera, it captures the friendships, scooters, coffee, waiting, laughter and everyday chaos of life in an Indonesian surf town.

If you have ever lived somewhere where the ocean decides your schedule, or realised that the best part of a trip was everything you did between the things you went there to do, this one is for you.

Watch Between the Surfs on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QeJ1QQ_A3_c

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