Film review: Girls Can’t Surf takes us back to the 80s for a terrific story

The documentary by Christopher Neilus is almost entirely composed of the women’s own testimony

Girls Can't Surf takes us back to when women began to come to the fore in international surfing. 

★★★★☆

Girls Can’t Surf (15A) is a documentary by Christopher Neilus that harks back to the 1980s and the era in which women began to come to the fore in international surfing. 

To the surprise of absolutely no one in the audience, the women — among them Lisa Anderson, Pam Burridge, Wendy Botha, Jodie Cooper, Frieda Zamba, and Pauline Menczer, all interviewed for the film — experienced entrenched sexism from the chaps, most of whom, as the surf journalist Nick Carroll rather brilliantly puts it, ‘had an impossible sense of their own magnificence’.

Chris Nelius is director and writer. 

From casual put-downs to physical violence, and the governing bodies paying women a fraction of the prize-money they were offering the men, the battles were many, and each victory hard-earned. 

It’s a terrific story (spoiler: there’s a happy ending) that is almost entirely composed of the women’s own testimony, much of which is delivered in uncompromising language (the men, according to Wendy Botha, were ‘dumb-arse chauvinist pigs’).

And then, of course, there’s the stunning historical footage of the women surfing life-threatening waves that plays out to a wholly appropriate punk soundtrack.

Don’t miss it.

(cinema release)