Point of Change is a beautiful, gripping, thought-provoking film about two surf explorers who ‘discovered’ a world-class breaker on a remote island. Did they cause its ruin?
n 1975, two Australian surfers thought they had discovered the holy grail: the perfect wave. Kevin Lovett and John Geisel were at the southernmost tip of Nias, a tiny island just to the west of Sumatra in. But during their first fortnight of carving up the then unknown right-hand point break at Lagundri Bay, a miraculous gyre that spat the pair out of ridiculously long-lasting barrels, they were hounded on the shore by sinister figures wearing bird-feather cloaks.
Two decades later, the bay area was blighted by jerry-built hostels, shoddy infrastructure and aggressive hustlers It was a touchy subject: Coley spent many months persuading people to go public. “They had to understand what I was going do with the film,” she says, “and that it wouldn’t be a negative thing to be on camera saying bad things about Nias.” Bonne Gea, from a Muslim Nias family and five-time Indonesian women’s surfing champion, is one of those who bear witness.
The film shows how mass tourism was a radical interruption to centuries-old Nias culture. Years after his initial visit, Lovett is told something shocking by Sufarma Gea, the area’s sole resident in the mid-1970s and a distant relative of Bonne’s. As the foreigners were leaving on a subsequent trip, a shadowy malefactor may have abducted and murdered a malaria-stricken companion of theirs.
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