Palmera Express
2015 · United States
Directed by Eddie Obrand
Genres: adventure, comedy, sports
Tones: humorous, theatrical, whimsical
Framed as an old man's recollection of his first trip to Hawaii's North Shore, four young surfers travel to the island for the first time and are shuttled around by the eccentric tour guide of a company called Palmera Express, each encounter spinning into its own offbeat story.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a surf movie that refuses to be a surf movie — wrapped in this framing device and fractured narrative that could've been precious but somehow stays genuinely strange; Obrand's betting on the tour guide's voice to carry the weight, which is either genius or disaster, and I'm still not sure which.
The RED-to-16mm emulation is a deliberate genuflection to The Endless Summer's visual lineage, and the anthology-within-a-frame structure echoes a specific tradition of digressive sports documentaries — it's formally aware of where it sits, even if the execution occasionally feels caught between homage and parody.
The decision to shoot digital but chase 16mm's texture is less interesting than the real choice here: threading everything through an unreliable narrator's memory means every tonal shift and story fragment becomes uncertain, and that single structural commitment makes a modest beach movie feel genuinely off-kilter.
Reviews
An attempt to make a short narrative film as well as a surf movie — a quirky version of the Endless Summer.