The Surf Report

K, a young Black surfer from the Rockaways, paddles out one morning and never comes back. His lover Freddie, unable to face the memorial service, drifts into a bar instead, where a tarot reader named Vivian draws him into a reading that opens a door between the living and the dead. Courtney Faye Powell's short, written and produced by Tate Nova, uses Queens' urban beach community as the backdrop for a story about grief, ritual, and the questions that loss leaves behind, with an undercurrent of anger at the violence that Black men face. Frankie LaPace, Ronald Peet, Alice Carey, and Matthew Maher star. Powell, who cites Antonioni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Agnès Varda, and Isaac Julien as touchstones, favors mood over explanation, and the film screened at London's East End Film Festival in the New Queer Visions program.