The Blind Sea review: surfing waves without sight

They say that it’s what you can’t actually see that scares you the most – the bogeyman lurking in the shadows, the monster under your bed … a vision of what could happen in the US come 5 November this year.

But if this is really true, how extra petrifying would it be to face the gigantic waves of Portugal’s notorious Nazaré as a surfer with next to no vision?

Or perhaps sometimes the opposite is actually case and it’s the very fact that the Australian athlete Matt Formston is physically unable to really discern the 30-metre tower of water looming up behind him, when bobbing on his surfboard waiting to catch the big one, which prevents him from dissolving into a shivering, quivering blob of screaming terror?

Who knows? But it’s fascinating to watch and draw your own conclusions.

Formston was born and grew up in the northern Sydney suburb of Narrabeen. His was a typical Aussie family, but that all changed for him at the age of five when he was diagnosed with macular dystrophy, leaving him with 3% vision. But that disability has only ever offered him ‘obstacles, not barriers’, as his father so succinctly describes.

Resolute in his lifelong mission to prove anyone that tells him he can’t do something wrong, he has been crowned para surfing world champion four times, has won gold and silver medals at the UCI Paracycling Track World Championships and represented Australia at the 2016 Rio Paralympics.

So to say he’s driven is an understatement extraordinaire, but equally to call him fearless would be to seriously diminish the sorts of breathtaking achievements that would be simply unthinkable for most people, let alone those without 20/20 vision.

This alone, however, was not enough to inspire Daniel Fenech to make this documentary. It was Formston’s plan to travel around the world and face the Nazaré that persuaded the writer/director to pick up his camera and follow him.

Because having retired from paracycling and looking for a new challenge, the man whose prime motivation is exploding other people’s assessments of his capabilities decided to head for the biggest and meanest wave he could find, and surf it.

_{The Blind Sea. Image: Bonsai Films.}

And that’s the bulk of The Blind Sea, which follows Formston on his mission to conquer the Nazaré, while stopping along the way to talk to the supporters and other interested parties to try and uncover exactly what makes his desire to succeed so relentless.

In the trailer, Formston declares, ‘As a blind person, it’s easier to surf bigger waves’. But then he doesn’t explain how or why that would be the case. Instead the film simply accompanies the surfer as he gathers his support team, heads to Portugal and then nuts out the process and the precision timing required to ensure that his wave watcher on the cliff and the jet ski rider towing his surfboard synchronise perfectly, in order to give him the best possible chance of pulling off the monumental feat.

There’s not a great deal more to the documentary than this, but it’s enough to make for diverting and, yes, inspiring viewing. There are revealing insights from Formston’s parents and immediate family, but the inclusion of the latter does also give the film some necessary balance. Watching his wife and children respond to the idea of him leaving them to satisfy an urge to undertake a undeniably dangerous quest, raises questions of accountability, and when does, or should, responsibility to others take precedence over personal goals?

To see his young son tell the camera, ‘I just say “don’t die”,’ can’t help but make viewers apprehensive. Obviously, people have been waving goodbye to their families and disappearing in pursuit of death or glory since time immemorial, but most of the time they can at least see what they’re heading towards. And what is coming at them …

The Blind Sea is released in cinemas on 15 August.