Beyond Sunset
2023 · 25m · United States
Directed by Keith Malloy, Jeff Johnson
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic, sensual
Emi Erickson charges 15-to-20-foot faces at Jaws on her father's long single-fin guns — on her own terms.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a surf doc to genuflect at the altar of transcendence and male ego — Beyond Sunset just... doesn't. Malloy and Johnson find something genuinely uncouth in the idea of a woman redefining a break on her own terms, which is the only reason it lands.
The film inherits the meditative pacing of classical sports portraiture while resisting its mythologizing impulse; the sensual underwater grammar and that single-fin constraint become formal arguments about autonomy, not just equipment.
The genius move is treating Emi's choice of gun — that long single-fin — not as quirk but as the entire film's skeleton; every cut, every underwater glide, every hold on her face reads differently because she's made a decision most surfers wouldn't, and the directors trust us to feel the weight of it.