Watch: ‘Haiku’

Haiku don’t rhyme. They don’t need to.

Written to elicit emotion and a sense of the present moment, the intentional asymmetry of these three-lined stanzas is charming. This, along with the ability to render vivid imagery with brevity, makes the 17-iamb poems not wholly unlike the offbeat, on-board styles of the handful of surfers featured in the latest namesake Vans film, which premiered last night in Los Angeles.

Set to a harmoniously dissonant score of LA indie jazz and spoken word verse, ‘Haiku’ features the dizzying footwork of San Clemente’s D-fin darling, Karina Rozunko, and an alt-surf dream cast of Alex Knost, Holly Wawn, and Lola Mignot, among others.

Clipped at a poetic seventeen minutes, the brief visual art piece is a playful melange of lo- and hi-fi wave riding, and one of the first in what we hope is a long lineage of films directed by Rozunko and co.