Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, January 5:
SHE IS THE OCEAN
Director:
Inna Blokhina
World Premiere:
International Ocean Film Festival (2018)
Select Festivals:
San Diego, Santa Cruz, Long Beach, Maui, Honoulu Surf, Worldfest Houston
About:
Profiles of nine girls and women who are connected to the ocean, mostly through surfing.
Filmmaker Inna Blokhina attempts to construct a unified film through a series of unconnected vignettes about various women and how they relate to the ocean, threading the five-year story of Cinta Hansel, a young Balinese girl who is fulfilling her American father’s unrealized dreams of surfing success, throughout the doc. While the intent seems to be a metaphorical trajectory of women’s involvement with the ocean from girlhood to senescence, this doesn’t really come across successfully, given that most of the subjects are within the same age range. Other than Cinta, the subjects, profiled in overly slick sequences with excessive music-video montages, include a young professional surfer who is the daughter of a Hawaiian surfing legend, a shark conservationist who educates the public about the misunderstood species through shark diving tours, a cliff diver who was inspired by her gymnast mother, a ballet dancer who likes to free-dive, an acclaimed barrel surfer, a big wave surfer, the surfing mother of a deceased surf champion, and Sylvia Earle, the noted marine biologist. These profiles are unfortunately too brief to be compelling, and their cumulative effect bears diminishing returns, making this of limited interest to all but die-hard surf film fans.
what (not) to doc 