This Is How Brazil Keeps Surf Culture Alive

Someone once said, “Ninety percent of success in life is just showing up.” The other ten? Probably knowing the right people. 

Bruno Zanin owes his filmmaking career to the late Ricardo dos Santos. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t be living this dream.”

At the time, Bruno was juggling life as a professional cook and an amateur filmer, squeezing filmmaking into his life like an afterthought, until it wasn’t. Ricardo saw Bruno’s potential and eventually approached him with a proposal: “Tell me you want to do this for a living, and I’ll help you out.”

“I went to a festival, saw a film on the big screen for the first time, and went back home knowing that’s what I wanted to do.” Bruno took up Ricardo’s offer and ended up tagging along on trips, camera pointed at Brazil’s rising stars. “He took me under his wing, taught me a lot, gave me a hard time too, but brought me into this world.”

Through Ricardo, Bruno became acquainted with the Dora family. Later on, a young Mateus Herdy naturally gravitated toward the group who were at the forefront of not only a style of surfing but also a style of filmmaking that was still uncommon in Brazil at the time.

One thing inevitably led to another, opportunity came knocking, and shortly after, Bruno had his lens all over the Brazilian Storm’s main rainmakers: Yago, Gabriel, Italo, the Pupo brothers, and so on.

“I embraced all those opportunities as if they would be my last, and ended up developing good relationships with the surfers.” Bruno maintains that his place is behind the camera and that his subjects are the real artists — a stance he believes helped garner respect from the surfers he works with.

Recently, Bruno added a new line of copy to his business card, stepping into a new role managing the careers of Miguel Pupo and pre-pubescent phenom Arthur Vilar. And if that wasn’t enough, he teamed up with Duda Saracura (whose work you’ve seen in Red Bull’s No Contest series and Italo’s Stab in the Dark) to launch the Floripa Surf Film Festival in 2024.

This year, for its second edition, the pair transformed a seaside hostel into an open-air cinema, exhibiting a lineup of 50 films. The program included the Brazilian premieres of “Circles” by Dana Shaw and “Return to Zero” by Amado Stachenfelt, alongside homegrown offerings from the yellow-and-green nation.

Layback — the brainchild of skater and pool aerial wizard Pedro Barros, which started as a beer brand and morphed into a skate park empire — backed both editions of the festival. Thanks to them and Perfect Swell, for whom Bruno also works, the event was able to break even this year.

For an entire weekend, Florianópolis pulsed with film, culture, music, and sun-to-sun parties. Bruno took an almost militant approach to the festival, seeing it as a public service to a generation of up-and-comers who are inadvertently limiting their consumption of surf audiovisuals with backlit vertical reels, and potentially morphing into the thing they’re gorging on.

“We’re doing this for the culture, so the next generation makes films and not reels for social media. We are where we are today because we watched many surf films growing up,” Bruno says. “Nowadays, few are watching them, and even fewer are making them.”

Coincidentally, just after chatting with Bruno, a film by a 20-year-old Brazilian surfer from São Paulo — who has been living in Maresias for the past eight years — paper-planed into our inboxes, hinting that the Brazilian youth is doing alright after all.

Two Sides of a Coin is a DIY film featuring Rodrigo Saldanha, made by his friend Mattah Yah (a name to incite jealousy in many a Jamaican dancehall), with some footage pulled straight from Bruno Zanin’s HD.

“I’ve looked up to John John my entire life. He inspired me to make my own surf films,” Rodrigo says, explaining that the film’s title is a nod to his bifurcated passions — competing and filmmaking. Having finished the South American QS just five spots away from a Challenger Series berth, he speaks candidly about his drive to make the CT. Like, soon.

Rodrigo’s father is also Charlie Medina’s brother, meaning his cousin is a three-time World Champion and Olympic gold medalist — the very same one he occasionally shares his local lineup with.

“In Brazil, no one cares about making films. Everybody’s just surfing to compete. That obsession with competition is part of the culture here,” he says. And like Bruno, Rodrigo points out how rare it is for Brazilian surfers to produce their own films. “I love making them, and I think they’re an important differentiating factor.”

Growing up, Rodrigo idolized Medina and Toledo, while keeping an unwavering eye on John John Florence and his self-made productions. Surprisingly, despite his age, Montaj and Trilogy are permanently imprinted in his mind’s eye.

At the time of writing, the film has a scant 961 views on YouTube, just shy of a year since its upload. With the kind of surfing on display, it almost feels as if Rodrigo has been shadow-banned by the platform.

While his name might still be unknown outside Brazil, the skill and maturity Rodrigo displays at home, in Hawaii, Indonesia, and in what is essentially a backhand tuberiding masterclass at Desert Point, suggest that today’s level of surfing is so high, even exceptional talent can slip under the radar.

Reels for instant gratification or films for posterity?

For Rodrigo, the answer is simple: “At the end of my career, I want to sit on the sofa, watch one of my films, and marvel at the fact that I was able to surf Desert Point when it was less crowded.”

With surf content increasingly tailored for micro attention spans, events like the Floripa Surf Film Festival play a crucial role in keeping the tradition of surf filmmaking alive — no matter where they take place. They provide a space for surfers like Rodrigo to find inspiration beyond the algorithm, realize that making films can be a legitimate career path, and, above all, create lasting capsules that preserve entire eras of surfing culture.