Nas Ondas Do Surf, Brazil's first full-length surf movie, came out in 1978. It is not a lost treasure, exactly. It breaks no ground, brings no green-and-yellow 

 flair to the genre. Nas Ondas is as unimaginative as 95% of what was coming out of American and Australia, in other words. Then again, Brazil in the 1970s, under a military dictatorship that was weakening but far from dead, wasn't what you'd call an incubator of creativity. Your gadabout Yank or Aussie surf filmmaker never had to take into consideration a federal government whose reply to a freedom-promoting movie might be to hogtie the director to a steel pole with jumper cables taped to his nuts. While commies and lefty students got the worst of it, Brazil's 

 did not fuck around with cultural deviates either (the great Caetano Veloso talks about it 

), and government functionaries saw subversives the way young Haley Joel Osment saw dead people, so you might think twice before preaching the free and easy democracy-adjacent gospel of surf. While the rest of us were cruising the back end of the Age of Aquarius, Brazilians were living the Years of Lead.

So let's be glad that Nas Ondas got made in the first place, and let's appreciate it as a fine 1970s time capsule and a blueprint for what was to come.

Nas Ondas makes the case that the origins of Brazil's rise to surf-world dominance began earlier than the rest of the world realizes. The surfing community by that time was already tight and energized, a new but durable competition structure was in place, and the drive to improve on the world stage—especially in big Hawaiian surf—was already baked into the Brazilian surfer's view of the sport.

Octavio Pacheco, Richardo dos Santos, Rico de Souza, Pepe Lopes and Daniel Friedmann are all featured in Nas Ondas. Like the movie itself, they are raw but energetic. None seem to be cowed by their newness on the world stage, either in competition (Lopes beat Jeff Crawford and Buzzy Kerbox to win the 1976 Waimea 5000, in Rio), or on the North Shore ("we called them 'Brazil Nuts'," photographer Jeff Divine said, "because of their unbelievable late-takeoff wipeouts at Pipeline and Sunset"), and maybe it is just hindsight, but to my eyes, you can draw a straight line from the fast-sprouting confidence of the Nas Ondas stars to the absolute surf-world command of Gabe Medina and Italo Ferreira.

Nas Ondas also inadvertently explains why female Brazilian surfers have lagged so far behind males. "For the audience during that championship [1976 Waimea 5000]," the narrator says, "a sideshow was the women's championships. Women surfers gave a show of beauty [but] mainly of humor, which didn't help with the popularity of women's surfing in the world." Or at least the popularity of women's surfing in Brazil, as expressed in the number of female Brazilian world tour titleholders, which is holding steady at zero.

Daniel Friedmann, for me, is the real discovery in Nas Ondas. I thought he was Col Smith—same flying black locks; same low-stance deep-rail rail game at Sunset Beach. That's Daniel 21:23, see what you think. (For what it's worth, Friedmann finished at #21 on the 1977 world tour, Col Smith was #25.)

Apologies for the hollowed-out audio. Since the narration doesn't do any heavy lifting in Nas Ondas, maybe dial up a Caetano Veloso playlist when you watch, the movie and songs should pair very nicely.

 to Rio's Roberto Moura for passing Nas Ondas along to Encyclopedia of Surfing.

"NAS ONDAS DO SURF" (IN THE OCEAN WAVES) 1978: FIRST FULL-LENGTH SURF MOVIE FROM BRAZIL

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