New Smryna Beach, FL – The Florida Surf Film Festival is proud to announce that Matt Warshaw has joined our jury of panelists, who will cast their ballot for best picture, best cinematography, and best soundtrack for the 2015 festival. Matt Warshaw, former editor of SURFER, author of The History of Surfing, Founder of The Encyclopedia of Surfing, lives in Seattle with his wife and son.
A couple of years ago, I was ambling around the Nighthawk Cinema in Brooklyn at the New York Surf Film Festival, holding a beer, and managed to strike up a conversation with a stranger doing the same thing, while I awaited the arrival of my fellow movie-goers. I think Kelly Slater had just devoured another slate of competitors in California, and I might have used my Florida origins to segue into the article I had read in The Surfer’s Journal. The article detailed the thrill of tuning into webcasts, but more to the point, it drove home the unspoken truth, which was that fewer than half of us would likely be navigating to these contests online if Kelly had retired or moved on from competitive surfing. It was then that the guy I was chatting with said, “Yeah. I wrote that.”
I introduced myself to Matt Warshaw and began a sycophantic slide to nerdy town, whereby I began to lay out a few of my favorite articles from years past and how they had influenced me. He had written many of them.
Surf cinema and documentaries trigger words on the street. “Have you seen Modern Collective?” or “the new John John flick?” It used to happen so with articles, and probably still does, but I found it exhilarating that not two weeks prior, I had been passing Matt’s article around the office. He’s a master journalist and writer. John Brooks and I are very proud to have him serve the festival as a juror for the Florida Surf Film Festival.
-Kevin Miller