The Australian brothers Abberton -- Jai, Dakota, pro-surfer and big-wave master Koby, and older bro Sunny -- come from a place called Maroubra Beach, where public housing, crime and gangs are an endemic part of the landscape. Maybe it's because the brothers have lived the story in Bra Boys, their genre-crashing, family-home-movie-surf classic-social documentary to be released in January, or simply that they have a compelling story to tell (including the arrest of Koby at the height of his career on an accessory to murder charge with an ending too dearly poetic to give away here) but the result is as remarkably honest and brutal as it is revelatory.
Director Sunny Abberton, who at 15-years-old discovered the world on the ASP Pro Tour, now 34, says the film's mandate was to "capture our own extreme culture." And with all the wisdom of a tribal elder, Sunny reflects thoughtfully and without sentimentality on the horrors captured in this soulful film. "It remains a positive, in that all the unrest brought the community together and how we all learned from the experience," says Abberton. "In the end, it taught us the value of being free and in the ocean." Narrated by local Aussie boy-gone-Hollywood star, Russell Crowe, who has shown fierce loyalty toward the brothers even "when our name in the media was mud," Bra Boys still has yet another chapter ahead: The documentary is set to be remade into a feature with Mark Wahlberg playing the part of Koby and Crowe making his directorial debut.
Born in cultures of injustice, territorialism and violence, surfing has today become a multi-million dollar sports industry, and the idyllic notion of a man and his board a sublimation of its history and darker reality. Bra Boys goes deeper.
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