Beyond the noise
This is not a review but personal thoughts on what i think is amazing and worth observing.
One of my favorite documentary films, not because is a surf film but because of its colors and compositions. This is not a regular surf film, I don´t even consider it as a surf documentary in my library. Surf films usually have similar subjects, photography, colors and overall feeling. The word artistic comes to my mind, also minimal and modern, but his director Andrew Kaineder went deeper. I believe that this was an exploratory work due to its length, shots and photography treatment, also because his early work is somewhat different.
This short documentary is like watching a painting tell us a story through images and motion, just like a masterpiece. Every single shot is carefully selected to make a singular and different composition on the screen, and along music and poetry, it represents ideas like time, tranquility, stillness, movement or life.
Even when the length is extremely short, around 38 minutes, Andrew Kaineder did a great job to balance the use of shots of nature and urban landscapes, objects, people and animals, as well as motion and stillness, obscurity and light, sound and silence, to represent the journey of the surfer through day and night.
All elements on the film are correctly integrated to give an ethereal atmosphere with color, sound, images and speed. The mixture of different subjects within and not just surf shots, make it interesting for a wider audience like film students, photographers or producers.
The photography in this film is just incredible, showing mastery in composition and color; achieving a great composition in still photography is not often that easy, imagine trying to frame a great composition in motion, with video. The shots are incredible clean, most of them without noise, well thought, reflecting the concept and subject of the film: beyond the noise.
Hints of color in predominantly dark images, big empty spaces with minimal lighting, and unbalanced image compositions make this great film worth studying.
My only critique is that I wish it lasted longer.