Waves of Action: 'The Cigarette Surfboard' | Green Film Festival of San Francisco 2024
Can surfboards save the ocean? No, but you can.
Dear Moviegoers,
The cuteness of inventive DIY projects, the boldness to develop messages into objects for change, and the creativity to tell stories through the tangible—this is what The Cigarette Surfboard is about. Anchored around craftsman and California surfer Taylor Lane, this documentary follows his creation of the “Ciggy Board” and its impact on his community and himself. He travels the world, meets fellow surfers turned ocean and water activists, and rides waves both literally and figuratively. It’s all so nice if all so long.
The film acts as more of a travelogue diary and adventure of sorts, being informative for certain but also a tad redundant in places where it could’ve avoided such a thing. Too much surfing? Too much activism? Not enough of either amid too many fist pumps and crunchy waves?
A surfboard made mostly out of cigarette butts, or “Ciggy Board,” is Taylor Lane’s gift to the world and the Save the Oceans movement, specifically its surfer advocacy wing. People are fascinated and excited about his Frankenstein-like creations, as he gets other and more well-known surfers to ride on them and speak out. In this way, The Cigarette Surfboard is incredibly engaging, very smart, and totally rad. This is the kind of film that makes one root and holler for its central hero, who ends the tale by taking on a particularly nasty and infamous kind of wave at the climax, all to support his boards and his message of taking action for change. Recycling plastic? More like stop it from its source.
Of great note is the challenge faced by Hannah Bennett, who the crew visits in Fiji, as her waters are just covered and filled with plastic trash. She even surfs the plastic to make her point about the ugliness and the toxicity of it all. The Cigarette Board excels at showing more than telling. Where it falters is in doing so almost all the time and in the same way each time, through surfing footage.
Of course, one expects surfing footage in a movie that has the word “surfboard” in its title. A nitpick yes, but too boring it gets. Diluting its earnest message is only detrimental.
That noted, The Cigarette Surfboard is almost far and away so much more heartful than average. How groovy, my peeps. 3/5
The Cigarette Surfboard was screened at the 2024 Green Film Festival of San Francisco and is available to watch through the event’s virtual portal until the end of 10/27.