We have come out of a Covid hiatus to welcome back the 14th Honolulu Surf Film Festival at the Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Museum of Art.

The opening night began with a reception in the Luce Pavilion which included live music by Temple Waves and a buffet dinner by the HoMA Café.

Halona Norton-Westbrook, the museum director welcomed the crowd back to the only surf film festival in the world that runs for a whole month. Doris Duke Theatre manager Sarah Fang and her committee chose the Sonny Miller classic ‘Searching for Tom Curren’, remastered by Derek Hoffman of Nalu TV, as the opening night film. Special guest surfer Tom Curren was on hand to field questions after the movie. Sarah Fang gathered together Martina Durand, Jon Santos, and Crystal Thornburg-Homcy to help select the films for this year’s festival.

Thanks Sarah Fox for the use of her instrumental music on this video.

“Dane’s ashes were added to the ocean at Pipeline second reef. A helicopter arrived from town to drop flowers on the paddlers. A school of dolphins worked its way north through the paddlers some jumping and spinning on the way.”

Roy Isamu Uemura, known to the surfing world as ‘China’ by those his senior and as ‘Uncle China’ by those younger, passed away on January 6, 2023. He lived life fully finding his own way as a surfer, professional surfer, and contest originator by starting two surfing contests, the Wahine Surfing Classic and the Longboard Surfing Classic. He was inducted into the Duke Kahanamoku Foundation’s Hawaii Waterman Hall of Fame.