This Wave Scares the World’s Best Surfers. Matt Formston Took it On Blind.
As a boy, he was told he couldn’t. As a man, he proved them all wrong. As an athlete, he’s smashed every barrier. And he’s not done yet.
Ready for a visualisation? Imagine a 5-story building, chasing you with a deafening roar, and then collapsing — crushing you with unimaginable force, squeezing every last ounce of air from your lungs. And to pound your pulse just a little higher? You can hardly see a thing.
No, it’s not an architect’s worst nightmare (or the latest extreme reality show about dodging collapsing apartment blocks). That “building” is an immense wall of ocean water, and slicing across its surface at speeds of 80km/h is exactly the kind of adrenalised high that big-wave surfers spend their lives chasing.
Matt Formston’s no different. After becoming a dual gold medallist and world-record-holder in competitive cycling, the Aussie athlete traded his bike for a board to take on some of the globe’s most thrilling waves — and earned 3 surfing World Championships for his troubles.
It’s an astounding sporting résumé. Yet Matt’s achievements gain even deeper significance when you learn that he’s earned them all as a blind athlete. Afflicted by a degenerative condition known as macular dystrophy since the age of 5, Matt has around just 3% of the vision of a regular-sighted person.
As for Matt’s vision to go after — and conquer — each sporting Everest? That’s crystal clear.
What is The Blind Sea about?
Directed by award-winning Sydney filmmaker Daniel Fenech, The Blind Sea is a film of two halves. The first details Matt’s reality as a visually impaired husband, father and colleague. Can’t imagine what it’d be like to live your life with only 3% vision? Fenech puts us right in Matt’s shoes — or rather, behind his eyes.
The second half takes the empathy we’ve built and infuses it with adrenaline, as Matt tackles “the pinnacle of big-wave surfing” — Nazaré, Portugal. Thanks to a unique seafloor gulf, the swell found at Nazaré means the waves surge toward the shore with potent force. Here’s where those infamous 50-foot walls of water are found, and they’ve cemented Nazaré’s reputation as the most fearsome and challenging big-wave spot on the planet.
Among Matt’s surfing crew, Nazaré gets described in awestruck tones as gnarly, incredible, and terrifying. A “dream place that can become your worst nightmare.” Seven time world women’s champion pro surfer Layne Beachley puts it more bluntly: “it’s a mountain of water lifting you up and swallowing you whole. And if you’re in its way, it will kill you.”
As a champion across multiple disciplines, Formston has nothing left to prove. So why take it on? Much like 2018’s Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo, Fenech focuses on the psychology behind taking such an enormous personal risk as an extreme athlete. Why surf the world’s biggest wave? Why risk your life? Why does the thrill outstrip the fear?
Over 90 minutes, The Blind Sea unpacks where Matt’s “why” comes from. Far from a vanity project, it’s not a documentary about being disabled. Rather, it’s about how Matt enables his dreams to come to life — and the vital team camaraderie he builds to help him achieve them.
“With surfing, it’s pure freedom for me. I’m totally independent.”
- Matt Formston
How does The Blind Sea make disability relatable?
In Matt’s first interview, we hear the cameraman talk him through where to “look” — which understandably, takes a few goes to get right (“Wow, that’s pretty specific,” says Matt when he gets the eyeline perfect). It puts us in Matt’s shoes straight away. That’s key because, as we see Matt go about his daily life, it’s often easy to forget he’s blind at all. It’s something even his wife Rebecca admits to wondering sometimes.
She describes her husband’s vision like “putting two fists right in front of your eyes, and then covering the rest in Vaseline.” Mick Curran, Matt’s tandem cycling pilot with whom he won two golds and 12 Australian national cycling titles, puts it more humorously, saying it’s like when you or I get up in the middle of the night, and we still make it to the bathroom without turning the lights on. “Matt’s just living his whole life doing a piss at 2am,” Mick laughs.
The Blind Sea gives us an idea of how Matt uses his senses to fill in what he can’t see: orienting himself with the sun, using sound to get an idea of surfaces, and making a mental “map” of his surroundings with quick touches of his hands, toes or cane. It’s become seamless to Matt; so much so that, at points in his life, it’s led to a strange kind of “double discrimination”.
Because Matt was highly physically adaptable (and did most stuff like a “regular kid”), he was often miscategorised by strangers for not “looking disabled enough”, people simply didn’t believe his impairment was real. It meant that Matt grew up dealing with swiftly degenerating eyesight AND ongoing judgement from those who thought he was joking or lying about it.
Very quickly, Matt discovered sport — the great equaliser. As a teen, it was the one part of his life where there were no “lesser than” boxes. “Sport doesn’t discriminate,” Matt says, under vision of him breaking the world record on his tandem bike with Curran in 2014. “It’s about who’s the best person on the field.”
“There’s no such thing as barriers — only obstacles. You go over it, or around it.”
- Don Formston, Matt’s Dad
In one illuminating sequence, Matt meets up with fellow Aussie surf champ Layne Beachley for her to try out a new bit of kit on the waves: a pair of “blindness goggles”. With blacked-out circles in the middle and the surrounding bits all blurred, they’re a way for any able-sighted person to gain a fast respect what life is like for Matt (Fenech recreates the effect on camera for the audience to experience it too).
Aside from being stunned at how little Matt can really see, Beachley quickly realises her other senses come to the fore. “It really makes you connect with the wave and how the board’s moving,” she says, “ like you’re at one with the ocean.” Of course, when they get back to shore, Beachley can do something Matt can’t — take her impairment away. As she describes it, “Now that’s an empathy building exercise.”
How does The Blind Sea explore the value of support and community?
The Blind Sea isn’t solely focused on Matt alone — because he’s not going it alone. At the World Para Surfing Championships, over 130 international athletes with a range of disabilities come together to “push the sport into higher places” (namely, a hopeful Paralympics bid). It’s clear that there’s a true fellowship between these athletes who share a common trait beyond their love of hanging ten.
There has to be — when you’re surfing blind, you need absolute trust in the person (or people) in the water guiding you. If that’s true of any surf spot, then it’s ten times more important at Nazaré, where Matt’s heading with a core team who’ll help him clinch a visually impaired world-record 50 foot wave. (Interestingly, Matt refers to it as a “project” — as in, “Mother Nature’s provided us with everything to get this project done in the right way.”)
Quickly, Fenech gives us a sense of the roles. For Matt to surf safely (and come back alive) in monster waves five stories high, there needs to be four jetskis around him in the water at all times. They use a series of whistles and signals that combine to tell Matt when the timing is perfect to begin a run, when to turn out and when to drop off.
One of the jetskis is “first safety”, operated by Dylan Longbottom; “someone I trust deeply,” Matt says. Another is rear-fitted with a sled for a fast pickup and getaway in case Matt’s knocked unconscious. There’s also a two-man camera team, Lucas the tow pilot — aka the “best jet ski driver in the world in big surf” — and perhaps the most vital role, a wave spotter up on the headland.
When the day arrives, it’s like Fast & Furious as the four jetskis zoom out into the Nazaré swell, swapping tarmac for the most treacherous waves on earth. We can feel the weight of every last tonne of water. But what could feel like crushing pressure becomes a communal moment of shared triumph. It’s not lost on Matt that, in a supposedly “solo” sport, it takes eight human beings to create his next champion’s ride: “It’s such a beautiful privilege to know that all these roles are dedicated to me having the best time of my life, but in a really safe way.”
“I was on that wave with him.”
- Dylan Longbottom, Matt’s First Safety Rider
What does The Blind Sea have to say about risks vs. reward?
Between Matt’s parents, his wife and his surfing colleagues, all of them have seen Matt’s go-for-broke spirit firsthand, and none of them are shy in recognising the dangers of Nazaré. The fact that these two things were bound to collide is a reality they just seem resigned to.
“Matt does everything he wants to do,” his wife Rebecca smiles with a half-eye-roll. “I’m very proud, but… let’s just hope he comes back in one piece.” Even his young son Max can spot the elephant in the room, saying “I’m a bit scared for him — I just say, don’t die.” Good call Max!
Going into training in Fiji, Matt sharpens up both his physical and mental strength, getting some advice from other (fully sighted) surfers who’ve experienced Nazaré before. There’s a reason every big wave surfer heads to Portugal to experience it, they remind him — there’s an incredibly strong energy to the water.
It means that while the highs are thrilling, the potential for injury or death is genuinely ever-present. In Matt’s case, his Orthoptist reminds him that a wipeout at Nazaré could mean damaging his retina further — and a risk of total blindness. Fenech invites us to ask, when are the risks TOO high? Is Matt willing to sacrifice the little visual connection he does have with the world in order to ride this wave?
“If he dies, he died doing what he wanted to do.”
- Lorraine Formston, Matt’s Mum
Half a world away, in Lennox Head NSW, are the other half of Matt’s support system, his kids and wife Rebecca. Through quick cuts of Matt playing with his son & daughter by day or tucking them in at night, it’s obvious they mean more to him than any medal or world record. Cue the inherent conflict that many high-performance athletes face: passionately pursuing something that takes time, attention and finances away from your family.
Fenech carves out some time to touch on that sacrifice and its psychological ramifications. Matt describes the budget he’s forced to pour into supplements and the weekends he loses in training and travel. When he clinches a championship, it’s all worth it. When he loses? “The guilt for me is that I’m away, I’ve spent this money as an athlete, and it wasn’t justified — because I didn’t win and deliver,” Matt says. “It’s wasted because I didn’t achieve the goal.”
It might be summed up best by Matt’s brother Stuart, who questions the psychology behind Matt’s need to conquer Nazaré — and the risks of not only trying it, but actually succeeding. “He’s driven, yeah. Driven by… whether they’re demons, I dunno. But the risk is — if this doesn’t tick the boxes that he’s looking to tick — what will?”
So what’s the takeaway from The Blind Sea?
Matt Formston admits he’s long stopped listening to people who told him he “can’t do that” because of his visual impairment. The Blind Sea exists as a testament to Matt’s determination to turn a blind eye (so to speak) to all the doubters.
Visually and aurally, The Blind Sea puts you as close as you can get to the heart of a thundering big wave ride. The combination of slow-motion cinematography, drone footage and long-lens photography at Nazaré is awesome. It’s hard to describe the scale, but we can FEEL the power (and the rumbling speakers!) as the immense waves propel the surfers across their curved, churning surface like ants. It’s often spectacular to witness.
More impressive, though, is the sense of teamwork and support — really, a brotherhood — that Fenech brings to the fore in the film’s final act at Nazaré. The cameras might be focused on Matt, but there’s another seven of his allies (all expert surfers in their own right) who are all invested in supporting Matt achieve his dreams. It’s obvious that any “win” of Matt’s belongs to them all.
“If you just focus on one thing at a time and do that well, then amazing things happen.”
- Matt Formston
Towards The Blind Sea’s conclusion, there’s a standout slow-motion moment where Matt simply floats in the Portuguese sea and breathes. In stark contrast to the roaring ocean we’ve heard so far, Fenech chooses to drop the film’s entire soundscape away at this point, conveying Matt’s sense of oneness with his salty surroundings.
“It’s such a beautiful feeling, being in connection with the wave,” Matt says. “People talk about ‘conquering’ Nazaré, but I don’t think that’s the thing. The part where you ‘conquer it’ is when you’re part of it — the wave’s with you and you’re dancing.”
Originally published at https://good.film.
