Surfing film festival to come home

The Florida Surf Film Festival and its stunning shots from inside the barrels of waves and tales of the healing power of surfing is slated to return to New Smyrna Beach next year after a two-year stint in Daytona Beach.

The festival was founded in 2013 as a labor of love by surfers John Brooks and Kevin Miller. Miller was chief financial officer at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the earthy, multidisciplinary artist campus situated among the oaks and palmettos along Turnbull Bay. Brooks had left the professional surfing tour and was representing Oakley and other brands. He and Miller met through a woman that Miller was dating, and then again at the first screening Miller did at ACA. The two talked, and Brooks agreed to join Miller as co-founder.

New Smyrna Beach was a good location for the festival because of its down-to-Earth surfing community centered around the beach’s consistent wave action. Swells arrive unimpeded by the Bahamas and interact with the jetties of Ponce Inlet and an offshore sand shoal. “Basically, the waves peak up better here than anywhere else in Florida,” Miller says.

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The festival has evolved into quarterly showings of original films in February, June, August, and November. The final wrap-up event in the fall typically spans two evenings and is punctuated by award announcements for short films and features in multiple categories.

Two years ago, Miller and Brooks moved the festival from ACA to Daytona State College’s News-Journal Center, a modern performing arts venue on the Halifax River. The sound and visuals were great, and there was plenty of room, but then the college decided not to renew the contract. The festival’s Daytona ride will come to an end in 2026, with the first showings in New Smyrna Beach coming in either June or August.

Brooks and Miller did not panic when the contract news arrived. “If they had renewed it, I don’t know that we would have stayed,” Miller says of the contract. “The grassroots nature of the festival is a better fit for ACA.”

For its part, the center is glad to have the festival back as a customer. “It’s art and surf and nature, which is what we’re all about,” says Jennifer Coolidge, the executive director of ACA. The arts community is glad too, judging by the applause that erupted when Miller announced the festival’s return Tuesday during the NSB Arts Forward strategy session hosted by Mayor Fred Cleveland at Brannon Center.

As for the details, Miller and Brooks have tweaked their plan in one significant way since the festival was last held at ACA. Attendees might recall intimate fall evenings at the center’s small, wooden, open-air amphitheater. The closing session was held there because by the fall it was dark enough at 6 pm to show films outside. “Everybody loved it, no-see-ems and all,” Miller says. (The center has since installed pods that automatically disperse environmentally friendly repellant around the periphery of the amphitheater.) Now, though, when the festival returns to ACA, plans call for holding the closing session in the city’s Brannon Center on the shore of the Indian River. The summer sessions will take place inside ACA’s Black Box Theater, as in the past.

The Brannon event will be a first, Miller notes, and he’s excited to see how the venue is received by attendees.

The awards ceremony in Daytona Beach earlier this week will be the last at the Halifax River venue. The winning documentary feature film, “Le Jardin – The Secret Story of Safi,” shows the beauty of “the bone-crushing” waves that rise along the rocky shoreline of the Moroccan city of Safi. Filmmaker Will Bendix of South Africa explores the tensions that come when a once-secret surf locale is discovered. “It’s not easy to keep a secret like this. You want to share it with your friends. The problem is, you share it with a friend – a friend has another friend,” and so on, explains one of Safi’s early surfers as the screen fills with multiplying cutout dolls.

Recognizing such creativity by putting on a non-profit festival requires more than ticket revenues and sponsorships. As with many art organizations in Florida, finding that additional funding has become vastly more challenging. The festival missed out on a potential $40,000 grant from the state of Florida by just half point on its application, Miller says. Then Volusia County ended a $29,000 annual grant opportunity.

Miller and Brooks did not panic about that either. “We had a private donor come out of nowhere and help us,” says Miller. Without grants in the next five years, “we couldn’t thrive, but we would survive.”

At the NSB Arts Forward event, Miller gave a short pep talk about the funding situation to his colleagues in the city’s non-profit arts community. The county financing “has been helpful in the past, and we're sorry to see it go, but we're gonna earn it back. And organizations like this are hard to ignore for very long because we will come together, we will speak up, we will show exactly how these arts organizations benefit the community.”

The benefits are not just about economics, they’re also about touching souls, he said. He referenced the 2020 surf film, “Water Get No Enemy,” in which children in post-civil-war Liberia turn from warfighting to surfing. “It’s an inspiring documentary,” he said.

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