The Town Watches Itself on Screen

It is one of the quieter rituals of summer on this coast: a couple of nights every June when a few hundred surfers and their families show up at Atlantic Center for the Arts, find a seat, and let the lights go down. The Florida Surf Film Festival has been doing this in New Smyrna Beach for years. This year it runs Father’s Day weekend, June 19 and 20.

There is a particular kind of magic in watching a surf film in a room full of people who actually surf. Every grimace at a bad wipeout is informed. Every cheer at a clean cutback is earned. Nobody is pretending. The lineup on screen is the lineup outside, more or less — only the water is colder, or warmer, or farther away.

This year’s program runs Friday and Saturday, two screenings per night, doors at five and screenings starting at six. The venue is Atlantic Center for the Arts — the festival’s original home, which it’s returning to for the 2026 second-quarter event. Tickets and the festival’s Green Room annual membership are at the festival’s site.

The Local Film

The piece a lot of locals will be there for sits on Friday night’s late program: Hometown Hype — New Smyrna Beach, a seventeen-minute short directed by New Smyrna’s own Sam Scribner. The festival’s own announcement describes it as part love letter, part history lesson, paying homage to the people who laid the groundwork for surfing in this town and tracing the culture, growth, and identity that came out of it. If that description sounds like the exact charter of this magazine, that’s not an accident. We share the project.

Scribner’s film screens at 8:30 PM on Friday, paired with Southern Edge, a seventy-five-minute Needessentials feature directed by Torren Martyn and Ishka Folkwell about an attempt to circumnavigate Tasmania in two eighteen-foot sailing kayaks with surfboards strapped on. So the Friday late slot is, in effect, NSB followed by the other side of the world — which is a pairing that tells you something true about how this town sees itself.

“The lineup on screen is the lineup outside, more or less.”

The Rest of the Weekend

Friday opens at six with The Emancipation of Timid Little Pipou by Rodrigue Llado — an eighteen-minute short about an awkward kid discovering himself through surfing across Brittany, southwest France, and Portugal — followed by Return to the Bering, a thirty-one-minute Fielder Films feature directed by Ben Weiland. The Bering film is the sequel to the festival’s award-winning Island X, and follows Noah Wegrich, Pete Devries, Mark McInnis, and Alaska exploration legend Josh Mulcoy deeper into one of the most remote and unforgiving stretches of ocean on the planet.

Saturday at six screens Spaces in Between, a sixty-seven-minute Needessentials feature directed by Milo Inglis about Johanna Brebner pedaling more than two thousand kilometers up the length of New Zealand with a surfboard strapped to her bike, paired with Morgan Maassen’s seventeen-minute Rán: A Scandinavian Surfing Saga — a film about Swedish surfer Freddie Meadows and a big-wave discovery in the Arctic, named for the Norse goddess of the sea. Maassen will be there for a Q&A. If you only have time for one of the four programs, that is the one we would point you at.

The Saturday late program closes the festival with Emilie Lowe’s six-minute Salt in the Veins — about two brothers who have been surfing together for over fifty years and continue to defy age and expectations — followed by Emmett Malloy’s Jack Johnson: SURFILMUSIC, a seventy-five-minute documentary tracing Johnson’s path from making 16mm surf films with friends on Oahu’s North Shore to becoming one of the most recognizable voices in modern music. The film features Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Gerry Lopez, Ben Harper, and John Florence, and is dedicated to the memory of Tamayo Perry.

Two nights, eight films, one art center, a few hundred locals. Sometimes the whole festival is just remembering this is also a movie town if you let it be one.

Sunday Morning: Paul Prewitt

The festival’s weekend ends, gently and deliberately, on Sunday morning — not at the art center, but at Al Weeks North Shore Park in Ormond by the Sea. At ten a.m. the community is gathering for a memorial paddle-out and beach ceremony for Florida filmmaker Paul Prewitt. The invitation, written by Diana Sita Prewitt, asks anyone moved to come to bring a favorite Paul Prewitt story or sighting to share.

We weren’t going to write a festival preview without mentioning it. A surf film festival in his home state, ending in a paddle-out in his memory, is exactly the kind of weekend this coast does well — the cinema and the saltwater treated as the same thing, which is what Paul, by every account from the people who knew him, understood them to be.

If You Go

Atlantic Center for the Arts is at 1414 Art Center Ave., New Smyrna Beach. Doors open at five each night, first screenings at six. The Father’s Day timing is intentional — this is a festival that knows its audience — so bring the dad or the daughter or the lineup buddy who will sit through ninety minutes of cold-water cinematography without complaining. Tickets are available through the festival’s site at floridasurffilmfestival.com.

The festival is presented by Monster Energy and Surfing’s Evolution and Preservation Foundation — the “Endless Summer” license plate in Florida — in partnership with Daytona State College’s School of Digital Media Production. It is a 501(c)(3). All facilities are ADA-compliant.

Go. Bring a sweatshirt; the art center runs cold. Stay for the raffle. Drive home slowly. The Atlantic will still be there.