You Should Have Been Here Yesterday
Following the success of his first surfing film ‘Searching for Michael Peterson’, Director Jolyon Hoff is travelling down the East coast with his acclaimed new surf epic ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.’
Hoff will present it with a Q & A at 4pm on Sunday 3 November at the Perry Street Cinema, Bateman’s Bay.
As this will be the Eurobodalla’s only screening, it would be best to book your tickets on the cinema’s website to be sure to get in.
You Should Have Been Here Yesterday is a poetic homage to Australia’s early surf-culture with unearthed footage set to an original soundtrack. It is drawn from hundreds of hours of lovingly restored 16mm footage and set to a downright killer music score by salty legends Headland. This totally radical documentary tells the story of a wild community who took off up the coast and discovered a whole new way to live. Come on a cinematic trip down the Aussie coast of years gone by.
Director Jolyon Hoff said “My childhood impression of surfing was that it was almost an entirely new way of living. It seemed to be wrapped around a collection of progressive and, at the time, alternative ideas; connecting to nature, engaging with eastern philosophies, practising healthy living, eating different foods, not working 9-5 and more. My hero was my uncle, who had moved to Lennox Head to surf, building his own shack out of wood salvaged from falling-down farmhouses. Surfing was beautiful, exhilarating and dangerous and felt ‘real’ when compared to my suburban Sydney upbringing.
As I grew older, I watched as surfing became more commercial, aggressive and competitive. The beautiful ideas I had related to surfing were sidelined as it was packaged and sold all around the world. One day I was standing on an underground train station in Washington DC, 6 hours drive from any ocean, and was surrounded by Billabong and Rip Curl t-shirts.
One of surfing’s original gurus, Alby Falzon, says “First they owned the companies, and then the companies owned them”.
Those original beautiful ideas seemed to be lost. I still saw them in the surf and on the beaches, but the perception of surfing had become something very different. For a long time, I’ve imagined making a film about the ‘true’ culture of surfing, about those beautiful dreamy progressive ideas which had first attracted me.
In 2008 I was in Dick Hoole’s garage looking for footage of famously reclusive schizophrenic surfing legend Michael Peterson for a film Searching for Michael Peterson. I found some beautiful shots of ‘MP’, but there were piles of other film reels. I wondered – what gold must be hiding in those other film cans? And what about the other filmmakers, what happened to their footage?
During the pandemic these two ideas came together and I decided to use this ‘lost’ film footage to make a film about the side of surfing which didn’t fit the commercial mould. I think surfing culture can be seen as an analogy for the wider Australian colonial culture and, as Australia moves forward, grows up and becomes more multicultural and globally connected, we need to decide what we want to leave behind and what we want to keep.
You Should Have Been Here Yesterday will start conversations. What mistakes did we make? And what beautiful new ideas did we help usher into mainstream Australia? There is a conversation taking place, and it has only just begun.
Monty Webber, Tracks Magazine, describes the film as as “A breathtakingly beautiful homage to the late ’60s generation of surfers. One for the ages.”
The film features Albe Falzon, Wayne Lynch, Bob McTavish, Maurice Cole, Pauline Menczer, Ma Bendall, Tim Winton and many more.
