Gender turf war in the surf
Daniel Nelson
Another wave, another film about female surfers and, like all the others, Bangla Surf Girls is fascinating because it’s about sexism.
There’s nothing surprising about the enthusiasm and on-board skills of some girls and women: what’s interesting is the fierceness of opposition to their participation, especially from fathers and families.
Initially, opposition also comes from male surfers. And before you rail at the way “Third World” male prejudice blocks girl surfers in Bangladesh, Senegal, South Africa or Sri Lanks - or in scores of countries where female boarders are still unknown - remember Girls Can’t Surf, a film that chronicled (in the words of the publication Still Stoked) “the inspiring true story of a group of courageous [Western] female surfers in the 1980s who took on the fluro, egotistical, male-dominated professional surfing world in a fight for inclusion, recognition, and equality”.
In her Bangladesh film, director Elizabeth D. Costa follows three three teenagers from Cox’s Bazar - Shobe, Aisha, and Suma - who want to make history as Bangladesh’s first women surfers in an international competition.
From the outset it’s clear that they love the freedom of the sea (“It’s completely intoxicating” / “It became my escape from everything”) and see with clear eyes what society expects of them (“My older sister married at 13… They have the same plans for me”) and why they resist.
Some of those expectations are conventional - for example, dress like a girl: “Everybody says I live like a boy.”
Others are more sinister. An uncle plans for one of the girls to be shipped off to Oman, giving her age as 25 rather than 14, to a man prepared to pay 50,000 tak. “Are they fools?,” she says. “He wouldn’t give that kind of money if he didn’t want something in return … Mom doesn’t understand that.” The protective surf club coach, Rashed, steps in to stop the trade, but the lie about her age will come back to haunt her.
Rashed, too, sees the conservatism of his surroundings with piercing clarity: “Here you always have to work hard to achieve something. There’s obstacles from all different places. Number one is family. Then community and neighbours.”
The girls battle for what they want, using their only weapons - their drive and personalities. Costa captures their mutual support and their joy as well as their dark moments. She is a sharp but sensitive observer of family life, but this isn’t a fairytale, so no happy ending is guaranteed, or even likely.
It’s an absorbing film. It offers intriguing (sometimes not full explained) aspects of its characters and of life in Bangladesh, and occasional lyrical views of sea and sky, but now that I have watched several documentaries about female surfers my overriding impression is not the individuality of local circumstances but the universality of the constraints on women.
Cyndi Lauper sang it right, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”. Yet so many men want to stop them.
* Bangla Surf Girls is showing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, in-person and online, 17-25 March. Info: https://ff.hrw.org/film/bangla-surf-girls?city=London