What’s a movie you expected to hate but ended up loving?
A couple of years ago my wife and I went to see Corners of the Earth: Kamchatka at the Avalon cinema. It was not a film I knew anything about. My wife loves Avalon and knew that it was showing on one of those odd weekends when a film appears briefly and then disappears. She wanted to go. I was happy enough to come along. I did not expect to hate it. I expected not to care much.
Avalon cinema is usually quiet. Most times we have been there, there have only been a few people scattered through the room. Once we took the dog with us and no one noticed. She sat quietly and the film went on and that was that.
This night was different. The place was packed. There was a kind of energy in the room before anything had started. It was clear that the film had a following. It was also clear that most of the people there were surfers.
Avalon is that kind of place. Tom Carroll lives nearby. Kelly Slater is often around. Surfing belongs to the life of the place. I like the ocean, but I do not read it. I was sitting in a room full of people who had come to see something that belonged to them.
Then I realised that the filmmaker, Spencer Frost, was the son of a man I had played soccer with for a few years. His father was a professional musician and also did video production. I knew that much about him. I did not know his son was making films like this. It was one of those small discoveries that makes the world feel oddly connected.
The film followed Spencer Frost and Guy Williment, with surfers Letty Mortensen and Fraser Dovell, as they travelled to Kamchatka in far eastern Russia to find waves along a frozen coast. They had planned the trip for two years. Then, just before they were due to board their flight to Moscow, Russia invaded Ukraine.
There were helicopters and skidoos and frozen campsites. There were frozen bank accounts and political complications. There were waves too, which was the reason for going, but the film became more than that.
These young men had gone looking for surf at the edge of the world and found themselves in the middle of history. At a time when everyone was watching the worst of human nature unfold, they kept meeting people who were kind to them.
I had thought I was going to watch a niche surf film. A film for people who knew the difference between one kind of wave and another. Instead I watched a film about risk, beauty, friendship, cold, fear, and the kindness of strangers.
When it finished, I was glad I had gone. I did not come out wanting to become a surfer. I still do not know how to read a wave. But for a couple of hours I had been taken into a world I would not have entered by myself.
That is a good thing for a film to do.
The Afterword 
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