Australian Surfer & Filmmaker Sunny Abberton

Bra Boys Director Chats About his Hit Documentary

Aug 26, 2008

Part 2: Director Sunny Abberton talks about his passion for storytelling, the Australian surfing community and what he hopes the audience will get from his film BRA BOYS.

You filmed your documentary Bra Boys for five years. How hard was it to know what to put in and what to leave out?

Well.. yeah. That's how our lives were! It was a roller coaster ride, so up and down and things kept happening like the shooting and then the race riots but it really just showed how our lives were and that’s what it was like growing up. You never really knew what was going to happen the next day and I was really trying to get the audience feeling that.

I guess you are just so close to it and its hard to see how powerful your story is now, but everyone I saw it with was really affected by it.

We really didn't know how the audience was going to take it because we didn't really do it for anyone else. It was just to tell the story and whether you walked out liking it or hating it, it didn't matter. It was our story. This was it. This is how it happened. This is what we did and thanks for being on the ride but you know, this is just the truth.

Apart from Ma, there are no other women characters in the story, why is that?

Well we actually tried to include them because obviously they are a big part of our community. We tried to represent Ma as being the powerful and the most respected person in the film, and her being a woman, but there were so many twists and so much stuff going on that we really had to focus and try to just keep to the story line of our group of friends and the brotherhood.

Is this movie an accurate reflection of the surfing culture in Australia or is it just Sydney's eastern beaches?

Nah.. Its definitely around the world actually. You'll find that the strongest surf cultures in Australia will usually have a really strong relationship with each other and other beaches around the world who think similar. So we're very united on the way we think the surf community should act and the rights that the surfers, the board rider community, should have in their local beach. I mean one of the issues we are trying to raise as well is that surfing and surf culture is under more threat from stuff like tourism and parking metres and pollution and over development and over crowding. I think it's really important that surf culture and board rider culture is acknowledged and respected because it is one of our only real beach cultures in Australia and its something that we don't want to let be wiped out and it seems like a lot of local governments try and do that. Move into an area and try and get the surfers and local population out.

At what point did you start considering a career path as a filmmaker?

Since travelling and working with cinematographers for a large part of my surfing career, I always wanted to do it. I was always just real curious and asked a lot of questions about the camera, lighting and the angles and why? And how? And especially after I researched it and I just feel like I had a different kind of opinion about it because I've been on both sides of it . I just thought having known it, and then having researched it and being so passionate about it, that would be the first and the best subject to start with.

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