Watch: Eli Beukes’ Self-Edited Ode To South African Winter

Who gets to name generations?

A committee vetted like Vatican cardinals picking a pope, or are they just arbitrarily coined by journalists burdened with tired eyes and sagging waistlines? 

Eli Beukes was born in 2001 — a card-carrying member of Generation Z, though he never applied for inclusion. Ian Curtis, the frontman of Joy Division, was born in 1956, technically making him a boomer. But no one in their right mind would call him that if he were alive. Such is the peculiar taxonomy of our times.

Joy Division’s “Interzone,” which opens Beukes’ new edit, was itself an homage to William Burroughs, who originally used the title for a manuscript that would later become Naked Lunch. Across decades and generations — from Burroughs’ Tangier to Curtis’ Manchester to Beukes’ South Africa — the notion of an Interzone persists. Along the coastline of South Africa, it manifests as a hallucinatory, liminal space, defying definitions or comparisons within surfing’s ecosystem.

Jordy Smith, who’d likely slap someone for even hearing El Salvador mentioned in the same breath as Jeffreys Bay, has called Africa the final frontier for surfing: a continent wrapped in quality surf and hardly any crowds — not you, Morocco. 

South Africa might just be the Interzone of the surfing world.

“In definition, Interzone just means something occurring between one or more zones,” Eli explains from his home in Kommetjie, where he’s spending the South African summer. “It’s also just the song that I’ve wanted to put some surfing to for a while.”

Like the waves he rides, Eli prefers to handle every aspect of his output himself. Interzone, edited entirely by its main character, joins a collection of other self-edited projects on his YouTube channel — a digital archive bearing his distinctive approach to surfing and filmmaking.

The film documents the past austral winter along South Africa’s West Coast, Cape Town, Durban, a requisite stop at the country’s crown jewel, and a brief neoprene-free trip to Reunion Island. Much of Interzone was shot close to home, a region that houses other freesurfers of the highest caliber, such as Brendon Gibbens and Mikey February. There might be something in the water besides great whites and kelp.

“We’re very fortunate with the waves we get throughout South Africa in the winter,” Eli says. “I was trying to mission around a bit and score wherever I could. It’s a small country, so it’s quite easy to move around if you have the time.”

At Jeffreys Bay, you might recognize the peculiar sled that EAST winner Donald Brink shaped for the winners of Stab Highway Europe during a celebratory trip to Costa Rica. As ¼ of the Red Team, Eli got his hands (and feet) on a custom asymmetrical thruster. “It was the craziest shaped board, with those rails and that double hip thing on one side. It was quite an odd design, but it seemed to go.”

Eli had been eager to test the board on J-Bay’s long walls. “At Supers,” he explains, “you can get a lot of speed, which is great for feeling out boards and figuring them out.” Though he had ridden the board a few times before, the wave unlocked its potential like no other. “If you’re trying to grovel somewhere else on a board like that, you might not figure it out properly.”

The board’s romance with J-Bay was passionate but brief. “I had a couple of fun waves on it, and I was happy, but I ended up snapping it toward the end of a session. That was quite unfortunate — I was pretty bummed.”

An outcome that isn’t exclusive to Brink’s foam and fiberglass sculpture. Eli’s approach to hollow pitching sections (as seen above) tends to take a toll on a good portion of surfboards, keeping his shaper, Dave van Ginkel, in steady business. “He’s actually my neighbor, which is quite convenient,” he says with a laugh before sharing his plans for the foreseeable future: “I just want to travel, surf, and film as much as I can. Be as productive as possible.”

In an age obsessed with labels and categories, there’s something both refreshingly straightforward and quietly rebellious about such clear-eyed ambition.