El Mar, Mi Alma (Stephen L Jones, 2011): Australia

Reviewed by Sandra Andersson. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Before watching El Mar, Mi Alma I had never seen a surf documentary, but I quickly realized that El Mar, Mi Alma isn’t a typical surfing documentary where we would expect the surfers to talk about how cool and wonderful surfing is. In this documentary they chose another approach, this documentary doesn’t have its focus on the surfers but at Chile’s nature and how important it is to take care of the ocean.

During the 60-minute long documentary the director Stephen Jones interviews the local people in Chile about the nature and primarily about the ocean. We get to hear about how the factories destroy the nature and how Chile have bad waste management, the government and the corporations doesn’t care at all – they don’t care what happens to the beautiful country.

El Mar, Mi Alma shows us beautiful pictures of the fishing boats in the harbor, the local people dancing in the streets and the mountains, and when you’re seeing that you wish the people of Chile would wake up and tale care of the country, the government should wake up and realize what they are doing to their nature. Once we get to hear a man say “The sea is my soul, my life, my everything”, that sentence alone could describe what many of the Chileans living on the coast think and feel. For them, the sea is their life and very important.

Even though this isn’t mainly a documentary about surfing we get to see amazing and breathtaking footage of the sea, waves and surfing. We get to enjoy the water splashing over the camera, to be inside a wave with the surfer and feel like we were actually there. All this with wonderful Chilean music by Manuel Garcia.

Through the documentary you get impressed by how beautiful the nature footage and the footage of the cities, factories and people are mixed together. The mix keeps you interested throughout the documentary and the sixty minutes flies by faster then you can imagine, and by the end you wish you could have seen some more.

I have always been fascinated by surfing, I have never tried it myself but I do think it is an interesting sport and seeing this documentary just makes me more fascinated. I do think that everyone should see El Mar, Mi Alma because it has a great message about taking care of the planet we live on, the documentary focuses on Chile and it’s coastline but we have pollution problem all over the world, we need to wake up and take action. We are responsible for the world we live in.