Image: Honolulu Museum of Art
The Honolulu Museum of Art will launch its Honolulu Surf Film Festival 2026 on July 9 with the world premiere of Increments of Fear: The Buzzy Trent Story, a new documentary on legendary Hawai‘i surfer Buzzy Trent. The festival runs through August 2 at HoMA’s Doris Duke Theatre and brings together screenings, panels and special events centered on surf culture, ocean storytelling and filmmaking.
HoMA describes the annual festival as a celebration of surf culture and cinema with selections of shorts and feature films from Hawai‘i and around the world, both past and present. This year’s opening night is anchored by the Buzzy Trent film, produced by the Bud Browne Film Archives, a long-standing resource for surf-film history. The museum is pairing the premiere with an opening reception on July 9, underscoring the festival’s role not just as a screening series but as a social and historical gathering point for surf communities.
The documentary itself grew out of material captured decades earlier. According to HoMA’s story on the film, Anna Trent Moore, Trent’s daughter, made tape recordings of her father in the 1980s, at a time when he was increasingly reflective after her mother’s death. Those recordings later became the basis for the 2010 book Increments of Fear: The Buzzy Trent Story, created by Anna and her husband, Ron Moore. The film now draws on that archive alongside historical footage from the Bud Browne Film Archives and interviews from the Buzzy Trent tapes that, HoMA says, have never been heard before.
The museum’s event page says the film captures one of big wave surfing’s pioneering icons and places Trent’s story in the sport’s “golden era.” Trent sailed to Hawai‘i in 1952 in search of the biggest waves he could find, and the film focuses on his role in trailblazing modern big wave surfing at Makaha and on the North Shore of O‘ahu. Following both screenings of the documentary, the museum will host a talk-story panel with surfing luminaries including Clark Abbey, Ray Beatty, Joey Cabell, Darrick Dorner, Reid Inouye, James Jones, Randy Rarick and Jock Sutherland.
The festival schedule extends beyond the opening title. HoMA’s festival page lists films including Haagua + Ceibo, Locals Only 2026, Antarctica–Domain One, Sea Her Stories, Magic Island, Keeping in the Shadows, Board Shorts 2026, SURFILMUSIC, Kingdom of the Evening and Surf Poets Society X HSFF 2026. Some titles screen on multiple dates across the run, and the festival also plans Audience Choice Awards and a Jury Award, with winners announced after the festival. The closing screening is Herbie Fletcher’s Water Colours on August 2, followed by a talk-story panel with Derek Hoffman of Nalu TV.
The wider significance of the festival lies in how HoMA uses cinema to preserve and circulate cultural memory. Increments of Fear is not simply a retrospective on a celebrated surfer; it is also a usefully local history lesson about Hawai‘i’s place in the development of modern surf culture and surf filmmaking. By screening the film at the Doris Duke Theatre and surrounding it with conversation and archival material, the museum is reinforcing the idea that surf history belongs within cultural institutions as much as on the beach or in the water. For HoMA, the festival is one more way to connect audiences to Hawai‘i-specific history while also linking it to a broader international community of artists, filmmakers and surfers.
