Brazilian boys riding Indonesian waves: orientalism and fratriarchy in a recent Brazilian surf movie

In this article, I discuss the 2016 Brazilian surf movie Um Filme de Surfe by Bruno Zanin and Leandro Dora, featuring surfers Yago Dora, Yuri Gonçalves and Lucas Silveira. This small group of Brazilian surfers and their camera crew travel on a chartered boat to an island in the Indian Ocean to catch an incoming swell, where they pretend to find an unknown surf paradise. While doing so, they orientalise the local Indonesian culture as an exotic, pre-modern ‘other’ who they, the ‘translocal’ modern surfers, encounter and teach about modernity. I will also examine how they perform a ‘bro’ masculinity that forms a ‘fratriarchy’ based on hijinks and pranks. In Um Filme de Surfe, the Brazilian surfers neglect to establish a dialogue with the local Indonesian islanders. They do not represent themselves as postcolonial subjects visiting a fellow culture from the global South; they are the cosmopolitan translocal surfers and the locals are mistaken for Polynesian islanders. I will then discuss how this film broadly reflects the challenge of representing non-white, non-Western surfers in the genre of surf films.