Riding Giants

"Riding Giants" (2004) is a surfing documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Stacy Peralta, who brought the same documentary eye to skateboarding in "Dogtown and Z-Boys."

The history of big wave riding breaks into three eras. Greg Noll paddled into Hawaiian swells in the 1950s that no one had touched before him — alone, no safety net, no reference point. Jeff Clark spent more than a decade surfing Mavericks, a powerful break off the Northern California coast near Half Moon Bay, by himself, because no one else would go. Then came Laird Hamilton, who scrapped paddling entirely, switched to a personal watercraft tow-in, and rode open-ocean walls of water that redefined what the sport even meant. Archive footage, first-person interviews, and Kelly Slater's commentary tie the generations together.

Peralta keeps the camera on the people, not just the waves. What he finds is less about sport and more about what it looks like when someone genuinely cannot stop. Stream "Riding Giants" (2004) on iFILM.