Girls Can’t Surf review — lively documentary about the struggle for recognition

Women in hitherto male-dominated sports (such as football in the UK and basketball in the US) are finally getting the mainstream recognition they deserve after years of tokenistic attention from administrators, sponsors and the media. But professional female athletes still earn a lot less than men in many fields. It’s a struggle to equalise the pay scales, even when teams and individuals do better in international competitions than their male counterparts.

Lively documentary Girls Can’t Surf (directed by Christopher Nelius) is supposedly a general history of women in surfing from the 1970s onwards, but its real throughline is that same struggle for equity and recognition. The stakes may not be as high as they are in, say, tennis, but the challenges of endurance and determination — not to mention sexism, eating disorders and homophobia — are just as dramatic and stark.

Several of the interviewees here recount how the competition for resources wasn’t always about money. Sometimes it was over the field of play itself, with the women fighting for the right to surf at the correct time of day, a small window of opportunity at some beaches. Tales are told of being jostled in the water during training by male athletes who take manspreading to a whole new level. But although competitive surfing mostly pits athletes rather than teams against each other, the women managed to join forces, at one point staging a sit-down strike on the beach during a competition.

These women were also scrappy and sharp-elbowed with one another. Wendy Botha recalls being happy for one long-term rival when the latter finally took a title from her, a feeling of generosity that was memorable because Botha felt it so rarely. It’s striking too how many of the women here recount how surfing was an escape from impoverished and abusive childhoods.

For some, touring was a kind of semi-sponsored homeless lifestyle, eked out in the backs of broken-down estate cars and vans. But even viewers who have never set foot on a board can appreciate how exciting it all was when they see the surfers in action in the many minutes of grainy, salt-smeared archive footage, skimming the swells with exquisite grace and tenacity.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from August 19