“Everyone’s trying to sell the core thing, so we actually went for corny.” Kolohe Andino and his brand, Steko, have a new surf film, Fudo, coming to theatres in late August, followed by a run of premieres before eventually landing on Stab Premium shortly thereafter. From the trailers and clips released so far, it’s clear a serious amount of effort has gone into making the thing: week-long setups for elaborate concept shoots, multiple international trips, a hired snake, and a deliberate move away from what Kolohe sees as an increasingly exhausted aesthetic — the Y2K-heavy, aggressively “core” fetishisation of surfing that has dominated the last five years or so. In its place is something Kolohe thinks surfing has lost, but which was abundant when he was coming up during the Joe G and Kai Neville era: style, artifice, mystique, and, above all, the simple biz of making surfers look cool. Fudo wears those influences openly, with the trailer borrowing liberally from the visual grammar and, in places, the actual concepts of those earlier films. Kolohe is upfront about the borrowing, seeing Fudo as a way to pump some air back into an old wheel he thinks has gone flat. Part of that, he argues, means giving surfers back a little mystique, rather than encouraging them to squeeze and share their lives into a vertical rectangle. Kolohe thinks brands have become too eager to merchandise the entirety of their surfers, and in doing so have diminished one of the things that made surfers compelling in the first place. The coolest surfers, in his mind, are the ones you can’t quite get your hands around, the ones who retain some fog around the edges, and certainly aren’t livestreaming the full record of their existence, a la Clavicular. It’s strange, then, to consider Kolohe’s progression: once-in-a-generation prodigy, pursued by every brand under the sun; top-five Championship Tour surfer who perhaps never quite satisfied the enormous expectations attached to his name; premature retiree from competitive surfing; and now brand owner, cultural critic and surfer-philanthropist, attempting to excavate the thing he fell in love with when he was a teenager. Jordy Smith joins Dooma as co-host, and the lads get into tour expectations, Kolohe putting millions of his own money into Steko, his final against Italo at D-Bah, the lingering brat reputation that followed him around the tour, his habit of putting fists through boards after losing, rookie-year Ethan Ewing thinking Kolohe was a p***y, and plenty more. Thanks to our partners at Red Bull, Vaer, Dome Dust, SlowTide, TurtleBox, and Devium, for making StabMic possible.
