Filipe Toledo, João Chianca, And The Pupo Siblings Spearhead A Momentum-Esque Motion Picture

“Ten years ago in Brazil, if you weren’t winning contests, you wouldn’t really have a place within professional surfing,” Tomas Hermes told us a few months ago, around the release of his self-produced freesurf film Vertentes.

The sentiment that free surfing and its accompanying films haven’t traditionally been supported in Brazil has been repeated countless times over. Much like Europe’s surf scene, however, the paradigm seems be to be slowly shifting — courtesy of filmmaking devotees like Bruno Zanin.

“Nowadays in Brazil it’s really hard to convince the brands that they have to do bigger things to keep the culture alive.,” Bruno tells me, regarding his new movie with FIlipe Toledo, the Pupo bros, Joāo Chianca, and a handful of other Portuguese-tongued talents.

“The brands just want Instagram followers, but I’ve fallen in love with surf movies, so I felt I needed to do something bigger than instagram even if they didn’t want to pay me.”

“We got some clips in Hawaii and Portugal, then all the boys were here at my home in Florianopolis and we had a special two days of surfing – that was when we realized we had a movie. The last section is from a secret beach close to Florianopolis. It was really special, there were hundreds of barrels with no one around.”

Raiz — an instrumental word in the film — essentially means core, he tells me.

“The main message of the film is to keep things core. Rock and roll, old school hip hop, really good surfing with good music. No Instagram, no vertical framing, none of that. I want the next generation of surfers and filmmakers to forget Instagram. We have a really good generation of Brazilian surfers right now, but imagine if they deleted instagram — we wouldn’t have hardly any memories of them! I want to create moments that last.”

Click above for 20-minutes of tastefully scored tubes and South American smiles from some CT talent.