The Astonishing Sports Documentary That Died and Came Back to Life

Part

Welcome back! Thank you for bearing with me during an exceptionally enjoyable family vacation. I learned about the big changes in the presidential election on the beach and read several books that will soon be up for major awards (more on that in a later column).

This past week also saw a flurry of announcements about the big fall festivals, with expected players including Joker: Folie a Deux and the Angelina Jolie-starring Maria world premieres. I’ll tell you more about that on Tuesday Prestige junkie podcast, where This Had Oscar Buzz’s Chris Feil and I analyze all the festival announcements and go deep into the source material for Luca Guadagnino‘S Foreignwhich will premiere in Venice.

In the midst of all that, it’s still Emmy season! On tomorrow’s pod, I’ll also in conversation with a new group of Emmy nominees, songwriters Benj Pasek And Justin-Paul, who could bag themselves the coveted EGOT if they win in September for their original song for Only murders in the building“Which of the Pickwick triplets did it?”

Today, however, I have a story that begins in the 2022 festival season, and actually ten years earlier, when the documentary maker Stephanie Johnes went in search of a female athlete to be the subject of her next film. What she found was a story, both on and off screen, that was filled with hope, heartbreak and tragedy, and that would completely change not only her life, but the lives of her subject and her cameraman.

Part

When Johnes looked Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira Gliding over 80-foot waves, taller than a five-story building and ferociously strong, she felt fear, but probably not the kind of fear you or I would feel. “I was more afraid of missing out,” Johnes told me recently. “You don’t know if she’s going to set a world record.”

Gabeira and Johnes spent a decade filming huge waves, waiting for the moment when Gabeira would ride the world’s biggest wave. When it happened in 2020, it was worldwide newsbut the story of what it took to get there – and the record wave two years earlier that went unrecognized – is far more complex and fascinating.

Gabeira, a woman in a male-dominated sport, is consistently underestimated by both the sports media and her fellow surfers, who seem as bewildered by her skills as they are by her own. Billie Jean King‘s rivals were hers in the 1970s. In the film, Johnes interviews surfers who openly assume that a woman can’t ride the same waves as men. She also captures Gabeira’s determination as she overcomes a near-fatal surfing accident and a world of skeptics to return time and time again to the massive waves in Nazaré, Portugal, ready to catch the one that will make history.

Maya and the wave premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, on an IMAX screen about the size of the wave Maya rode. “It’s an incredibly feminist portrait,” she says. Thom forcesthe documentary programmer for TIFF (and friend of The Ankler) who introduced the IMAX premiere. “But it’s also a stunning athletic feat that ranks among the best sports documentaries. You could call it the most accomplished Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker “I wouldn’t want a long-form writer to write Maya Gabeira’s story, but it could never capture what she experiences and the epic scale of nature she encounters.”

Johnes and Gabeira attended the TIFF premiere along with family members and the film’s cinematographer and co-producer Jorge Lealwho was a well-known videographer in Nazaré before collaborating with Johnes on the film.

“It was just such a great celebration after this decade of work,” Johnes says. “It was a great memory. It was my last great memory.”

Part

Give a gift subscription

Maya and the wave was the first runner-up for the festival’s Audience Award, and Johnes and the rest of the team had every reason to expect distributors to come knocking. But with Covid uncertainty still lingering and Netflix still fresh from the major correction that brought its acquisition spree to a halt, Maya and the wave was left aside.

“It’s been a really tough year, and you never really know why no one got behind it,” Johnes says with a hint of peaceful acceptance. “It seems like such an obvious crowd pleaser, but it also has what I think is a beautiful, strong message about gender equality. It has some substance to it. Maybe that was a little uncomfortable.”

“Let’s not ignore misogyny,” Powers says bluntly when asked about Maya and the wave not acquired, pointing to 2023 Cup 71 as another female-focused sports documentary that “didn’t have the offerings that I thought they should have had.”

A month after TIFF, Johnes was preparing for the next festival premiere, the opening night of DOC NYC, when Maya called her in a panic. “She said something had happened to Jorge,” Johnes recalls. “We thought he had a heart attack.”

It turned out to be a brainstem stroke, leaving Leal completely immobilized except for blinking. Johnes and Gabeira both joined him at the hospital in Portugal, where doctors were convinced he was brain dead.

Then they got the idea that saved him.

Part

Get 10% off a group subscription

“It was actually Maya who had the idea,” Johnes says. “She was like, we can find out if he’s there, because his eyes were opening and closing. And I remembered The diving bell and the butterfly. I thought, we can talk to him by blinking.”

Gabeira and Johnes began asking Leal simple questions that he could answer with a blink — Who is the president? What’s the code to unlock your cell phone? — proving that he was still alive there, despite what the doctors said. The women took him to a hospital in Spain that specialized in the kind of large-scale rehabilitation he needed, and they spent the next 10 months by his side.

“It was definitely a friends mission,” Johnes says. “He really leaned in so hard to help me with the film, made it so beautiful. He put his reputation behind this woman who had been trashed by so many people. That was a deep piece of love and appreciation.”

“Jorge barely survived, and the first year was really hard,” Gabeira added via email. “I feel like I’m still recovering emotionally from everything. And I’m happy that he’s home now with his family and still recovering.”

Today, Leal, now 49, lives with relatives and is “adjusting to a new reality,” as Johnes puts it. He has regained the use of one arm and some speech, completed hundreds of paintings, co-authored a book of poetry, written a screenplay about his experiences and become a chess grandmaster, among other things.

As a surf videographer, Leal earned the nickname Polpo, which means octopus — “because he could literally fly a drone, hold a radio, film a camera, he could do 10 things at once,” Johnes says. Now that his mobility is limited, “you just realize that so much creativity is mental,” Johnes continues. “There’s so much you can do just by having a creative mind.”

Johnes spent most of 2023 caring for Leal and working on music licensing for Maya and the wave but the film aside. “I was getting invitations to festivals, but it’s like, am I going to celebrate when my boyfriend is literally the worst off? So I just wrote to festivals and said, please think of us for next year.”

Part

Many of those festivals did follow up; Maya and the wave is currently in the midst of a World Tour: Miami, Tel Aviv, Nantucket, Melbourne, Munich and many more. The film will go on a self-produced, Oscar-qualifying tour of U.S. and U.K. cities in the fall.

That’s not the release plan anyone expected after the premiere two years ago, but no one involved Maya and the wave has been known to shy away from a challenge. “I hope people enjoy it and appreciate the amount of effort it took to live, make this film, and show it to the world,” Gabeira writes. “The film has an intense story, but the story behind what it took to do it is perhaps just as intense as the film itself.”

“It would be great if a major distributor would want to release it, but I also find it challenging to figure out how to do that,” Johnes says with a smile. Without sharing the film’s specific budget, she acknowledges that she personally invested more than six figures in the project and worked on it for a decade without ever asking for compensation. “Maya almost died and came back. Jorge was dead there for a while. It definitely feels like that’s what I’m doing with this film. I think, I can bring this film back to life. Look at me.”

Part

leave a comment