Following a vision-impaired surfer, The Blind Sea is far from a hero portrait. This is what makes it interesting

For a documentary to be successful, it needs to be proficiently made and, more importantly, focus on a subject of interest to the viewer.

Let’s face it: a story about a blind big wave surfer is an awesome subject for a film (surely Hollywood have optioned the rights for the dramatisation?). You’d have to be made of stone not to find something of interest in The Blind Sea, the new documentary from first-time feature film maker Daniel Fenech.

The Blind Sea follows vision-impaired surfer and Paralympic cyclist Matt Formston from Pismo Beach, California, to Narrabeen, New South Wales, as he sets about preparing to surf the notoriously dangerous Nazaré beach break in Portugal.

Footage of Formston assembling the team and doing the requisite training (under the guidance of his mentor, big-wave surfer and board shaper Dylan Longbottom) is peppered with interviews with his family and workmates.

Fenech and team do an exceptional job capturing the excitement of surfing – the opening montage sequence, in which the viewer is situated in the midst of the surf, is one of the best I’ve seen in a doco – and the excellent big wave footage is sure to appeal to the general public as well as waxheads.

That being said, given that Formston doesn’t actually ride the biggest waves we see in the film – because of safety – there is something slightly underwhelming about the climax in which he rides a very big (though not the biggest) wave, carefully surfing the edge of it.

This is not to belittle Formston’s achievement, just to note one of the limitations of the genre. If this were a dramatisation and not a documentary, no doubt the most monstrous wave in the film would be the climactic one.

Elevated beyond the feel good

The lovingly captured details of the characters around Nazaré wonderfully humanise the whole affair. There’s one guy who sits on the headland strumming an acoustic guitar and singing every day, and then there are the surfers who work with Formston, paragons of the laid back surfer dude.

This gets to the crux of what makes the film a far cry from a hero portrait of Formston (though it does appear in this garb), and, I would suggest, elevates it beyond the feel good story we might expect: our central character comes off as so prickly that nothing about the film feels particularly good.

There’s no doubt Formston is a high achiever (and if you did doubt it, I’m sure he’d tell you otherwise), but his spouting of platitude after platitude about overcoming obstacles seems increasingly robotic as the film progresses.

Interviews with his wife Rebecca seem peculiarly forced, carefully “on-script” in managing his brand, and Formston comes across more like a corporation than a person. He works for – and seems to be heavily indebted to – Optus, and parts of the film play like an in-house Optus advertisement regarding their support for people with disability.

See it on the big screen

The guy is definitely impressive, and being blind from five would undoubtedly endow most people with at least a medium-sized wooden plank on the shoulder. But he also seems guarded, and at the same time, for someone who has had to struggle against the odds, extremely egotistical and without any humour or humility.

Without his maniacal drive he probably would not have achieved the remarkable things he’s achieved. But we sense Formston is contemptuous of people who don’t have this drive, as though life is only about crushing goals and climbing mountains.

What about people who are satisfied with living in and enjoying the moment, with pleasure in the day to day? Are they lesser people?

At the same time, there are lots of things people actually can’t do. Often this is tied to resources, but there are also physical limits. Most people will never be Olympic sprinters, regardless of how “goal-oriented” they are. Does this make them failures? One of the ridiculous aspects of the self-help era (tied to the relentless individualism of the neoliberal ethos) is the bogus optimism that suggests that everything is just a matter of attitude.

None of this is a critique of the film itself. In fact, it makes The Blind Sea a more interesting proposition than if it were either a simple hero portrait or a self-conscious interrogation of the limits of heroic myths.

In any case, it is a very well-made documentary, the subject is awesome, and there’s enough energy here to carry its length. It’s definitely worth seeing this one on the big screen.

The Blind Sea is in cinemas from today.