Beyond the Island: New film to chart Scottish surfer Ben Larg's first steps into big wave arena

The remarkable story of Larg’s rise from Tiree-based teen hopeful to serious big wave surfer has already been told in one feature-length documentary – Martyn Robertson’s Ride the Wave, which premiered at the London Film Festival in 2021. It’s a measure of how quickly his career has been progressing, however, that just a few years later there is more than enough fresh material to justify a new big screen outing.

Ride the Wave told the story of Larg’s initial rise to prominence, from a sometimes difficult childhood on Tiree, where surfing offered a much-needed escape from bullying at school, to the life-changing moment in 2019, when, aged just 14, he rode a 30-foot monster wave at Mullaghmore in Ireland, and was suddenly catapulted into the global surfing consciousness.

Co-directed by Sam Howard and Antoine Couturier, Beyond the Island will mostly focus on Larg’s adventures since then: his first forays into surfing giant waves at Nazaré in Portugal, his inking of a sponsorship deal with Red Bull in 2022, and his stellar performance at the Big Wave Challenge surf contest earlier this year, also at Nazaré, which saw him more than hold his own against some of the best-known big wave surfers on the planet.

If that summary makes Larg’s successes seem as if they have been easy, in reality they’ve been anything but. The shadow hanging over the first part of Beyond the Island is an assault Larg suffered in the autumn of 2022, when – having only recently signed with Red Bull – he was out surfing on a small day at Nazaré, got into an altercation with a local bodyboarder and received a punch to the side of his head which burst his eardrum. Initially he thought the injury would only keep him out of the water for a matter of weeks; in the end, though, as the film makes painfully clear, it turned out to be a lot more serious than that, threatening to derail his career just as it seemed to be taking off.

Howard and Couturier are keen to stress that the finished, feature-length film of Beyond the Island (which could also potentially be realised as a series of three 30-minute episodes) will have various different themes running through it. But one of the key messages they are keen to convey in the opening segment is that localism – the variously interpreted surfing code which suggests that local surfers should take priority over visitors (see also: Lorcan Finnegan’s new film The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage) – should never become an excuse for violence.

“Localism’s a really key theme,” says Howard. “It’s silly because, to people outwith surfing, it doesn’t seem like a complex concept – y’know, don’t punch people. But there is that side to localism where it does have its place. There’s no ski patrol [in the water], there are no grades on the runs like there are at a ski resort, so the guys that surf a spot all the time should probably get a bit of priority – they know how the spot runs so they should be able to advise people on that. So there’s that side of localism, but then there’s the step where it goes too far, to verbal and physical violence, which is just uncalled for. At the end of the day, everyone’s just out there to surf waves and have fun.”

Howard and Couturier first started working with Larg three years ago. To begin with they were planning to create a series of short, action-focused videos to be released online, but they soon realised that something more substantial might be possible.

“When the Red Bull signing came along that’s when everything started to change,” says Couturier. “We were like ‘Wow, OK, there’s a story here, he’s going from amateur to professional, he’s going from an island with no real surf community… out to Nazaré. We were really keen not to show just the highlights, because that’s all you get on social media – it’s not interesting. We were like: ‘Let’s make this relatable, let’s show the challenge for someone so young rocking up to a stage that’s so full of egos. How the hell do you cope when you’re just 17?’”

The rest of the film will chart Larg’s progression in this high-pressure environment. “For a lot of his first season [in Nazaré] he couldn’t really surf because of the injury,” says Howard, “but after that his surfing just grew and grew. By the end I was like, ‘This is crazy, this kid’s drawing some of the best lines out there.’”

For more on Beyond the Island, see northernfront.uk/ and buytickets.at/northernfront