‘Heart of the Sea: Kapolioka’ehukai’ WHEN: 10 p.m. Friday CHANNEL: KCET/28 By SHAWN PRICE The Orange County Register Rell Sunn was not pro surfing’s first female surfer. Nor was she its greatest champion. But the documentary “Heart of the Sea,” airing at 10 tonight on KCET/28, shows she was one of its most beloved. Sunn was one of the top stars in women’s surfing, with a combination of power, grace and beauty, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 32 during the 1983 Op Pro contest in Huntington Beach. During her 15-year struggle with the disease, she became an inspirational figure to a generation of young surfers and an icon of survival to women fighting cancer. She died in January 1998 at age 47. “People talked about her as this mythic figure,” filmmaker Lisa Denker says. Collaborator Charlotte Lagarde had already made two films about women who surfed, and by the time Denker and Largarde were in the planning stages of a film on the history of women’s surfing, Sunn’s name had come up over and over. “We thought we’d better contact her, but she was going through chemotherapy at the time and wasn’t up to it,” Denker says. "But out of the blue in 1997, Rell called and said, ‘Come on over.’ " They arrived at Sunn’s home in Makaha, Oahu, and found a frail woman just a shadow of her former athletic presence. “We realized we were on ‘Rell Time.’ So we just made ourselves available to her. We ended up doing a three-hour interview with her that was the backbone of the film.” Given the middle name Kapolioka’ehukai by her grandmother, meaning “heart of the sea,” Sunn became one of the pioneers in women’s surfing, co-founding the first women’s professional circuit (the Women’s International Surfing Association) in 1975, followed by Women’s Pro Surfing in 1979. In 1982, she was the top female longboarder in the world. And the annual Rell Sunn Menehune Surf Meet she started for local kids in 1975 is still running, 28 years later. She was also a renowned diver and frequently spearfished to feed herself and her daughter, Jan. She also worked to preserve native Hawaiian culture and the environment. After being diagnosed, she discovered that Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women had the highest incidence of breast cancer in the country, and she became an activist and educator for awareness. Even while she was sick, she arranged sponsorship and chaperoned a group of 24 young surfers to the Biarritz Surf Festival in France in 1995. The two filmmakers spent time with her and local kids, to whom she had become known as ‘Auntie Rell,’ and filmed her husband helping her into what was to be Sunn’s last wave. “And it’s not like she wasn’t busy,” Denker says of Sunn, who had become quite a revered celebrity in her native Hawaii. “But she was ill. At the foot of the sofa where we interviewed her were oxygen tanks. I know there was an urgency” to the interview. "We wondered if it was right. We thought, ‘Shouldn’t we let her rest?’ So we left it up to her, and she really wanted it. She had a media face she let down. She never went as in-depth in other interviews as she did with us. “It was intense. It was an emotional thing. We would drive away crying.” Two days after filming the interview, Sunn went into a coma. She died a month later. “It was always about living for her, so we picked up again and decided to do a life portrait. It took five years and it really needed it.” Despite a lack of support from the surf industry, the filmmakers were able to get funding (and Quiksilver, the Huntington Beach surfwear company, has helped arrange some film festival screenings). The Hawaii premiere was attended by nearly 6,000 people on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. Its universal theme of life even played well to crowds in Nashville. “She’s real substance. And she was aware of how precious every minute was. I’m surprised there’s not more (in the media) out there like that.”
…Thanks,for the info.I’ve been waiting for this awhile.Rell was a GREAT PERSON,if you never met her or known about her ,please watch this documentary.She was one of the few locals @ Makaha that made me feel @ home when I lived there.Herb
She may have won in '82, but in '83 it was the year of the Mearig. Kim Mearig, that is. I’m proud to say that is my dad’s cousin. But seriously, it’s cool to walk by Jack’s in HB and see my last name on the surf walk of fame.