Astronaut in the Ocean
2025 · 11m · USA
Directed by Keith Malloy
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Australian bodyboarder Shane Ackerman charges heavy waves on a foam board and flippers while working in the mines to fund a life that few sponsors will.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a sports doc, sure, but the real subversion is the poverty angle—a guy funding his obsession through mine work isn't some inspirational poverty-to-glory arc, it's just the unglamorous math of loving something nobody will pay you for. That's the weird premise everyone pretends doesn't exist.
Malloy situates this squarely in the lineage of contemplative sports cinema—less *Man on Wire* spectacle and more the patient observation tradition of *Touching the Void*—where the formal restraint lets the contradiction between labor and desire do the heavy lifting.
The decision to keep the mining sequences unglorified, almost administrative, rather than cutting them for dramatic contrast—that's what makes the bodyboarding footage hit harder; the film trusts that juxtaposition without underlining it, and that restraint is everything.