INDONESIA ANDRE PASKOWSKI THE BONAIRE KIDS ARE

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NORTH AMERICA’S WINDSURFING MAGAZINE
THE
MOVIE
ISSUE
WITH GUEST
EDITOR JACE
PANEBIANCO
EXPEDITION
INDONESIA
ANDRE
PASKOWSKI
INTERVIEW
THE BONAIRE
KIDS ARE
ALRIGHT
SPRING 2011
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Stepherd Gustowski.
Jurgen Saragoza.
THE BONAIRE STORY
Mak i n g the C hildre n o f t h e Win d D o c u menta ry
WORDS BY ROBERT MCCORMICK | PHOTOS BY RICHARD SCHMON
Children of the Wind is unique in the filmography of windsurfing. A departure from the action/lifestyle/travelogue-driven windsurfing films of the past, Children of the Wind will be character-driven; it points its cameras on a group of young people from the island
of Bonaire who travel from poor, humble beginnings to international fame in the sport of windsurfing, along the way transforming
not only their island and their own lives, but the face of the sport worldwide. The film is expected to be released mid-2011, and the
following is a piece by producer Robert McCormick describing how the documentary came about and the “making of.”
Amber Jasperse.
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Kiri Thode.
Bjorn Saragoza.
Maxime van Gent.
Amado Vrieswijk.
Taty Frans.
Tonky Frans.
Daniela Simal.
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T
onky Frans and I make eye contact and the
most charismatic grin in professional sports
proceeds to light up an otherwise dreary
morning on the island of Sylt, Germany. It’s
the day before the opening ceremonies of
the PWA Colgate World Cup, and I haven’t
seen Tonky since our month of principal
photography back in May on his home island
of Bonaire. Then, we were in boardshorts and t-shirts, and now
we’re bundled in down jackets and hoodies. Our filming team
had only been able to confirm the trip to Sylt at the last minute,
and Tonky has been competing in Europe so he is surprised
we are in Sylt shooting. After a bear-hug greeting and a bit of
catch-up talk, we find ourselves walking on the beach in front of
the colourful vendor tents that extend about half a mile down
the beach. Suddenly, Tonky turns to me. The twinkle in his eye
and affection in his smile can’t belie the serious curiosities that
underscore the question I can feel coming on. He asks, “Bob,
why are you doing this, man?” I know he’s not questioning my
sanity for taking on the most boring two-day drive in Europe—
London to Sylt—he’s asking why we are making this movie. I
guess he’s playfully testing me for some esoteric answer other
than the one he already knows: “We have a core team made up
of film-industry professionals who have a love of windsurfing,
Bonaire and its people, and feel the story of windsurfing on that
island needs to be told.” But his question—we are interrupted
so it ends there—reminds me of how the answer is both as
simple as I’ve stated above and also much more complex.
While no sane person should launch into the extraordinary
and wondrous abyss that is the world of documentary filmmaking without having carefully pondered what they are getting
into first, occasionally stars align, personalities mesh, and fate
allows disparate characters and their destinies to intersect at
the right time and place to set something in motion that blissfully overrides any number of obstacles because it’s fueled by
something more powerful: passion. Ironically, as it turns out, our
insights are laden with experience, as the parallels between the
story of windsurfing on the island of Bonaire and the story of
the making of Children of the Wind itself are strikingly similar.
Both have been, and are, driven by the leading players’ love for
windsurfing while they crusade to gain respect, raise awareness and, most importantly, money, to create something that
has the power to change lives and make a difference. And both
have a spark plug by the name of Elvis Martinus, who has been
instrumental in the formative stages.
The Frans brothers. Carter/PWA photo
PWA event in Sylt. Carter/PWA photo
Team Bonaire. Carter/PWA photo
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Taty in Sylt at night. Carter/PWA photo
WELL-KNOWN WINDSURFING INSTRUCTOR
AND VIDEOGRAPHER CHARLES DASHER
CALLS WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING ON
LAC BAY “THE MIRACLE OF BONAIRE.”
The origin of Children of the Wind is a tale of four
people: Peter Robertson, Daphne Schmon, Elvis Martinus
and myself. I am Robert McCormick, a long-time actor,
indie-film producer, adventurist, and sports addict with
a particularly potent form of the illness when it comes to
windsurfing. I’m also father of Daphne Schmon, a recent
graduate of Wesleyan University’s film school and multiple
award-winner for her short films. Daphne has inherited
her father’s addiction gene for flying over the sea on a
board with a sail attached. Peter Robertson is a long-time
friend who also dutifully attends Windsurfers Anonymous
meetings whenever possible. But when it comes to work,
Pete is one of the most in-demand camera operators in
the major motion-picture business, with a resume that
reads like a “favourite films” list. Elvis Martinus lives in,
and is a native of, Bonaire and is one of three co-owners of
Bonaire Windsurf Place. Elvis is a man who values action
over words, and if something needs to be done on Bonaire,
Elvis has the gravitas, respect, energy and follow-through
to get it done. The story of windsurfing on Bonaire has
several leading players, but for what has been accomplished on the shore, like his namesake, Elvis is the King.
Fueled by the encouragement and support of Elvis,
Part One of the “making of” occurred after a year of
e-mails, conference calls and visits to Bonaire, when
Daphne put together a promotional trailer in January of
2010 based on footage she and I had taken earlier that
month. The trailer generated over 10,000 hits on YouTube
in the first week and received supporting e-mails from
around the world, confirming there was an audience as
curious and hungry to see the Bonaire windsurfing story
told as we were to tell it. So, our team assembled in New
York at the beginning of May for several days of camera
tests, and then, with 18 hard cases packed with film equipment and half a dozen more with clothes, we arrived in
Bonaire in early May for principal photography.
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Gear for filming.
Cruising on Lac Bay.
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Patun Saragoza.
The tower.
Daphne and Elvis.
Of course, in classic indie-film tradition—and may the bigfunding genie-in-the-lamp be reading this carefully—though
we had received heartfelt grassroots donations through
our non-profit fiscal sponsor, we still had not come close to
raising enough money to pay for production costs. However,
May was the only possible window when everyone was available, so we decided to plunge over the cliff, work for free and
self-finance. After all, it was a project of passion, and the
decision was made far easier by the remarkable sponsorship
and support we were receiving from the Bonaire community,
led by Elvis and his partner Roger Jurriens, who arranged
accommodation, food and transportation.
With the constant help of Elvis as our liaison, and the
support of all the windsurfers and their families, we plot
out a shooting schedule that utilizes every minute of every
day and go right to the heart of the themes we want to
explore. As with most windsurfers who visit Lac Bay, we are
fascinated with what we see the tribe of youngsters accomplishing on the water—from the two-year-olds, up to Tonky
and Taty Frans who are in their lower twenties. Well-known
windsurfing instructor and videographer Charles Dasher
calls what has been happening on Lac Bay “the miracle of
Bonaire.” It’s as if there’s a Lac Bay Academy churning out
world champions at every age category, topped off by the
THEY’RE BEATING
THE BEST COMPETITORS IN THE
WORLD, DESPITE
THE FACT THAT
MOST OF THE
KIDS COME FROM
POOR FISHING
FAMILIES.
collective dominance of Tonky, Taty and Kiri Thode at the
pro level. And these kids aren’t just good; they aren’t just
beating kids from the next island, they’re beating the best
competitors in the world, despite the fact their little island
has very little money, utterly no sports infrastructure, and
most of the kids come from poor fishing families. How is it
possible? Further, as we dig deeper we discover that these
kids have actually been influencing the face of the sport
worldwide. How? Well, kids love tricks. They love tricks
on skateboards, snowboards, BMX and, yes, windsurfing
boards. Freestyle, therefore, draws the young to the sport.
Manufacturers were quick to take notice and started
designing boards specifically for freestyle. In fact, these
same manufacturers started asking Tonky, Taty and Kiri to
help them design freestyle boards. To illustrate this, we
shoot a sequence with Taty describing a board by Starboard with his name on it, which was designed specifically
around testing and feedback he had given the shapers.
On the water, the Bonaire kids and pros are all pushing themselves to completely new levels of achievement
that, in turn, is setting the bar higher for their competitors
worldwide. The first several days, we set up a tower in
the middle of the shallow Lac Bay and keep the cameras
rolling—the Panasonic VariCam on top, and the Canon 5D
with underwater housing down below—while the gang
does tricks all around us. The huge cooler we float out
to the tower each day is soon known as “Bob’s Floating
Deli.” On shore, and guided by input from Elvis, we make a
comprehensive list of individuals who have unique insights
into the story we are telling, and who graciously and
enthusiastically meet us wherever we want to shoot them.
Amazingly, the island itself emerged as an important
character in the story. We are all products of our past, our
heritage, our culture and our physical environment, and
nowhere is this truer than Bonaire. The local population,
including the Frans family, is derived from a mixture of African slaves, South American indigenous tribes, the nomadic
Carib tribe and European settlers. To examine this history,
we fly with Elvis to the neighbouring island of Curacao and
spend half a day filming inside a slave ship that had been
reproduced in the Curacao Museum, and that poignantly
reminds us of the wretchedly inhumane circumstances
in which the ancestors of our principals had traveled to
Bonaire. We spend the afternoon interviewing Olympic
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track star Roy Bottse, now a prominent lawyer. Roy has a
unique knowledge of Bonaire’s windsurfing legacy, as he had
organized the island’s first windsurfing regattas. His gripping narrative of the social atmosphere on the island in the
‘70s underscored the blatant Dutch elitism that windsurfing
pioneers, like Elvis and Patun Saragoza, had to continually
overcome to be taken seriously and be given responsibility.
Perhaps most profound is documenting the Bonairians
life before it became a tourist economy—which has only
happened recently. We do this several ways because it
reveals so much about the early lives of all our protagonists
and the roots of their drive to succeed. For example, we
spend a day on the interior farm of Patun Saragoza, and it
replicates exactly how many Bonairians have been living
for hundreds of years. With cameras rolling, we spend the
morning in the bush hunting iguanas with Patun and his
young son, Bjorn, who is an emerging PWA star. After watching Patun skillfully lasso what can only be described as “a
big one,” we film his mother cutting away the edible skin
of a cactus bush. As we eat our dinner of cactus soup and
iguana—both delicious, I might add—Patun describes how
that very meal was the only means of subsistence for him-
IMAGINE, FOR A SECOND,
IF TONKY HAD NOT
IMPULSIVELY ASKED TO
BORROW ELVIS’
WINDSURFING KIT
WHEN HE WAS A
LITTLE KID FISHING
ON A WHARF
IN TOWN?
Tonky Frans.
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self, his family and many Bonairians when he was growing
up. He says, “We were poor and we had nothing. It was very
difficult to survive.” Later, we dance by a fire as our young,
world-class athletes do forward flips over it. Framed in the
foreground of the rustic island farmhouse are scores of silver trophies that have been won by Patun and his sons over
the years. The gleaming trophies form a wall of achievement
in the dusty yard and serve well as a reminder of just how
much Patun and the windsurfers of Bonaire have achieved
from such impoverished beginnings. It is all caught on film.
We spend a lot of time with Tonky, Taty and Kiri on the
beach, in the water, riding quad ATVs in the mountains, in
town, and in their grandparents’ home where they have
grown up. We also follow them for two weeks in Sylt,
Germany. Interestingly, we all know them through their
windsurfing skills and radiant personalities, but we know
nothing of their personal background or upbringing. In fact,
we are surprised to learn that even their closest mates on
the PWA tour have no idea. It just doesn’t come up. And, yet,
they have a past that is as stirring and inspirational as it is
unexpected, complicated and, yes, painful. And how can we
adequately describe Tonky Frans’ influence on the story of
windsurfing on Bonaire? If Elvis was the mover-and-shaker
on land, and Patun, in effect, carried the competitive torch
on the water during the formative years in the ‘80s and
‘90s, and Ernst Van Vliet pioneered the scene on Lac Bay,
then it was Tonky who led the charge in the completely
new direction of extreme freestyle in the 2000s. Imagine,
for a second, if Tonky had not impulsively asked to borrow
Elvis’ windsurfing kit when he was a little kid fishing on a
wharf in town back in the ‘90s (a scene we recreate in the
film using a kid-double cast by Tonky himself)? Or if Elvis
had refused? Without Tonky first, would Taty have ever
taken up the sport? Or Kiri? There is no reason to think so.
Perhaps even more pivotal is Tonky’s rebellious spirit on the
water. It’s a non-issue now; in fact, we expect the kids to go
out and work on freestyle for countless hours because the
discipline has gained respect. But when Tonky was a kid, everyone thought he was just wasting his time fooling around
with silly stuff when he should have been concentrating on
racing skills. He refused and kept doing his thing. He was
the classic teen rebel. He dyed his hair red, he wore earrings, and no one took him seriously until he started doing
manoeuvres few in the world had seen before. Looking back
today, the ripples of what he started have spread through to
his remarkable brothers and cousin, his island and his sport.
I haven’t even touched on our segments on “flowstyle”
and the remarkable Ceasar Finies, or the extended
sequence that stars the island’s windsurfing governor Glen
Thode (no relation to Kiri), or important interviews with
Richard Visser, Minister of Sport in Aruba, and freestyle superstar Sarah-Quite Offringa, both of whom flew to Bonaire
at our invitation; or, of course, the current tribe of windsurfing kids themselves, who we follow on the water, at their
homes, in their school classrooms and doing other, shall
we say, ‘rad’ sports on land; nor the memorable two weeks
in Sylt, Germany, where we follow the pros and hear from
many of their famous peers... but more on this for the next
article! We are now in post-production with our L.A.-based
editor, Alex Jablonski, who is hard at work on the rough
cut—perhaps two months away—then finishing with pickup
shots, music rights, final cut, grading, sound, and then, dear
readers, with the hope that the funding genie really did read
this article and will magically appear, by mid-2011 to you.
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