Jury Award |
| Best Documentary Film |
I have never been on a surfboard in my life, but thanks to surf documentaries like "Endless Summer", I do think the sport of surfing is pretty cool and something I would like to try before I kick the bucket. So I was interested in watching "Bustin' Down the Door" when I found a copy, especially since it promised to discuss something about the sport I didn't know about before - how surfing became a multi-million dollar industry.
A cocky group of top surfers from both Australia and South Africa go to the North Shore in Hawaii in the mid-1970's in order to make their mark by transforming surfing that at the time was widely perceived as a leisurely activity into something that could be taken seriously as a legitimate professional vocation. Wayne 'Rabbit' Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Shaun Tomson, and Peter Townend are amongst the bold pioneers interviewed herein who took Hawaii by storm with their exceptional surfing skills, a brash and fiercely competitive go-for-the-throat attitude, and swaggering bravado that spit in the face of staid tradition and royally upset the locals, yet in the long run proved to be hugely influential figures in the world of surfing.
"Bustin' Down the Door", tells the tale of the rise, fall and rise again of the surfing culture on the North Beach area of Hawaii in the 1970's and documenting the rise of the professional surfing industry I felt that even though the story was interesting and some of the archive action shots of the surfers and the waves were very good although much, too much of the time the camera was focused on the faces of individuals in the story just relating their particular version of the tale to the viewer from their viewpoint that's why I thought that it would have been far better made as more of a documentary (perhaps for TV) than a big-screen film.I was also a little disappointed in the music that went with the surf scenes I thought that this could have been done an awful lot better maybe, perhaps I may have been too harshly comparing it to the superb Pink Floyd music from the Echoes album that went alongside another "surfer" type film in 1975 called "Crystal Voyager".
