SEOTY: Enzo Cavallini Stars in ‘Malware’

Guadeloupe sits as a lush, butterfly-shaped anchor in the middle of the volcanic arc that makes up the Lesser Antilles.

The small, postcard-perfect Caribbean island has oddly become one of Europe’s most productive surf breeding grounds, directly feeding the French talent pool.

Erwin Bliss, Gatien Delahaye, Thomas Debierre, Issam Auptel, Tim Bisso, and others may not be household names among our anglophone audience, but they consistently leave their mark wherever they paddle out, with or without a singlet.

Enzo Cavallini, 27, hasn’t necessarily been under the radar either. But to the surfing world at large, he’s still virtually unknown. Like the surfers before him, Enzo took advantage of the air bridge between Guadeloupe and France (no bureaucracy, language barrier, or currency exchange) for a chance at professional surfing.

Sitting next to him is Simon Levalois-Bazer, also from Guadeloupe and now based near Hossegor. He edited, and filmed a large part of Malware, Enzo’s 2026 SEOTY entry. “It’s the easiest move, and you can just find work here,” he says of the relocation.

Southwest France, where they both moved to, has long been the epicentre of French surf culture and its symbiotic industry. “If you’re from a Caribbean island and never leave, no one really sees what you can do,” Simon says. His thoughts are shared by other excellent surfers from the region. In recent talks to Stab, Bajan brothers Jacob and Josh Burke echoed the sentiment.

Malware was almost entirely self-funded and took two years to make. “I paid for most of it myself,” Enzo says with firsthand knowledge of the scarcity of resources within the European surf ecosystem, which inevitably impacts how far one can reach.

The film was assembled in fragments shot between QS events, injuries, and whatever windows of time and money they could find. Indonesia, Ireland, Guadeloupe, and neighboring islands made their way into the final cut, including a trip to an elusive sandbar enabled by a friend’s boat. Much of the footage, naturally, was gathered around Hossegor, where access was easiest.

Enzo is convinced that with proper backing, the project could have gone much further. But even within its constraints, he didn’t hold back, particularly in Ireland, where he surfed Mullaghmore, Aileen’s, and Riley’s — a wave he had to himself on a late afternoon, just before dark. 

“I just bought an inflatable vest so I don’t die the next time I go to Ireland,” he says. On his first trip all he had was a basic impact vest and a 7’0, while everyone around him were on 9-foot guns, inflatable vests, and full safety teams on jet skis.

While simply coming out of Australia or California can bring a great surfer a sort of default legitimacy, and media gravity alone can benefit one coming out of the US, the existence of a European surfer is rather peripheral unless their output becomes too undeniable to ignore.

For most, competition is the clearest route out of that periphery. But even that path has its limits. Plenty of CT surfers lack the cultural weight or marketability of lesser-skilled freesurfers.

Enzo leans toward the freesurfing side. “To me, there’s no better feeling than choosing a destination, going there with a filmer, and scoring for a few days,” he says. “But I really like competing, and I want to prove to myself that I can qualify for the CS.”

It comes as no surprise that freesurfing would become his favorite avenue. Growing up in relative isolation has its perks: fewer crowds, warm water and weather, a safe, free environment where surfing is both a way to pass the time and enjoy island life.

Guadeloupe is less of a novelty than people assume. “You can surf pretty much every day from September to March or April,” Enzo says. “Summertime is kind of flat.” During winter, the trade winds blow into many of the island’s lefts, including the rampy one featured in Malware, which turns on for “maybe six weeks during winter.” North swells, on the other hand, bring a few rights to life.

“When we were kids, we trained maybe twice a week,” Enzo recalls. “The rest of the time we just went surfing by ourselves and enjoyed it.” That kind of independence, he believes, is disappearing.

Both Enzo and Simon think style comes from time spent surfing and filling the gaps yourself. They also agree that Europe’s coaching culture is flattening style and individuality. Too many young surfers are being over-coached, and extremely dependent on those adults to even go surfing. Enzo cited an example of a young surfer who won’t go for a surf unless a coaching session is scheduled.

In their opinion, another symptom of the era’s homogenized robotic styles is the inability to watch any surf content apart from reels, which is all they observe younger surfers feasting on these days.

“It’s going to be interesting with this movie,” Simon says. “I wonder if a 14-year-old even has the attention span to watch a 20-minute film.”

It’s therefore not accidental that the film opens with a kid finding a surf DVD wedged between a pile of discarded surf mags. The grom is played by Mathis Lazard, another young ripper from Guadeloupe who is ironically being coached by Enzo in real life. 

His character eventually gives in to curiosity and downloads something that seems likely to change the way he surfs, and probably ruin his parents’ laptop.