Waves off Khalaktyrsky Beach in Kamchatka. Image credit: Guy Williment

It’s late afternoon in Abu Dhabi, and two surfers from Sydney’s Northern Beaches are sitting in an aeroplane that’s been stuck on the tarmac for close to three hours. The plane was bound for Moscow, but it’s February 23, 2022 and news has just broke that Russia has invaded Ukraine. The surfers, Letty Mortensen and Fraser Dovell, are with two of their best mates, the filmmaker Spencer Frost and photographer Guy Williment. The pilot has just announced that the flight will continue through to its destination, and after three years of planning a mid-winter surf trip to the remote and largely unsurfed Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, the crew has about one hour to decide whether or not they’ll remain on the plane and fly, or pull the plug on the entire thing. 

While they’re waiting, Williment snaps a photo of Mortensen. Face mask on, eyes closed and hands in a prayer formation, it says everything you need to know about the intensity of the situation. 

“We had no idea about the severity of the situation, or what we were flying into,” recalls Dovell. “And we were getting messages from our families saying ‘you’ve got to come home.’ But then other people were saying, ‘just get to Moscow and see if you can get in’. There was a lot of confusion in the air.”

Letty Mortensen on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi. Image credit: Guy Williment

As their phones pinged with news alerts, they made the call to push on. “We had to group together and make that decision as a team,” says Dovell. “It was actually good that we’re all so close, because we could talk pretty openly about it.” Mortensen nods vigorously. “It would’ve been so different if we weren’t with our best mates, and we were like, fuck, I want to be professional, but I also want to go home… It was like: ‘okay, how are you actually feeling? Because we care about each other. So we needed to agree on this.” 

Image credit: Guy Williment

As you can probably imagine, this was the first in a long list of close calls and dicey moments for the group of mates behind the newly released surf film Corners of the Earth: Kamchatka. With a war unfolding around them and sanctions being imposed on Russia from the West, they entered Moscow—only to almost be deported after authorities couldn’t locate their visas, and have their credit cards stop working, which forced the team back home to come up with some pretty creative ways to transfer money—before eventually finding their way to Snowave Kamchatka, a surf camp situated below the active stratovolcano, Avachinsky, on the peninsula’s west coast. 

After days of travel, they were greeted by blue skies, a working beach break and a bumbling bear-like character named Anton, who runs the Snowave surf camp and ultimately emerges as the film’s breakout star. His life motto? “Shred or die.”

Jet lagged and emotionally spent, the boys jumped right in. The smiles on their faces, which were almost frozen stiff by the water (“it’s like the worst ice cream headache you’ve ever had”), calls to mind two groms shredding together for the very first time. Which is fitting, because this is exactly how Mortensen, who is now 26, and Dovell, who’s 25, first met. 

Image credit: Guy Williment

“We always saw each other in the surf from when we were about 10, and then we started competing against each other, and that was it. We were just surfing every day together,” says Dovell. “I’d stay at his on the weekend—we both grew up in Avalon—and we would get hot choccies and surf all day,” adds Mortensen with a grin. “Legit. We got a hot choccy/donut combo. I think it was like $4. It’s funny, that’s what we remember.” 

Photographer Guy Williment (left) and filmmaker Spencer Frost. Image credit: Fraser Dovell

They started doing junior pro comps around the same time, and later surfed on the Qualifying Series together. Today, they’re both free surfers—Mortensen surfs full-time, while Dovell works as a landscape architect while surfing on the side. In 2019, Dovell travelled to Iceland with Frost and Williment to film their first project together, A Corner of the Earth. The two have remained best friends throughout their teens and into their twenties. And in addition to the geopolitical tensions that percolate in the background, which maintain a presence in the film without becoming its central focus—a deft choice of Frost’s—the bond between the boys is what gives Kamchatka its universal appeal, which is somewhat of a rarity in the surf film genre. 

Frost (left) and Mortensen kicking back. Image credit: Fraser Dovell

“I think Spenny and Guy did such a good job at portraying Letty and I as ourselves. Like, you get the raw, uncut versions of both of us,” observes Dovell. “You really see us all at our most vulnerable.” 

Snowave Camp operator Anton Morozov. Image credit: Guy Williment

The moments of vulnerability also set Kamchatka apart from its contemporaries. “There’s that scene in the chopper where my arms are wrapped around Fraz and we’re watching out the window and I’m crying and that whole time we’re like, just squeezing each other,” says Mortensen. “It's pretty cool that lots of different people have connected to that.”

“Apparently at one screening, there was an 85 year old woman who walked into the wrong cinema. She sat down and the film started and she watched the whole thing,” they both laugh. “Apparently she was blown away by it.” 

Finding that unsurfed left. Image credit: Guy Williment

Of course, there’s still plenty of wave time crammed into the film’s 90 minutes, and while up in that chopper, it was a heaving left spotted by Dovell about two kilometres out from shore that became another of the journey’s biggest surprises—the crew had only expected to find beach breaks, not a slab that no one had ever surfed before. 

"It was getting kind of late in the afternoon. And I think at that point, we really realised that we were so far away from anything—from any help, from helicopters, from hospitals, any of that. I think it was that point where, like, if something went wrong, we could actually be in a lot of trouble,” admits Dovell. “We were so scared the entire time that day with the left. It was pretty fitting that it was me and Morto trying to figure it out together.” 

Image credit: Guy Williment

Another close call came as the group was snowmobiling through the mountains, when a white out completely obscured their sense of direction. “I felt super out of my depth there. We couldn’t see anything and we had no clue what was going on. We just had to follow the guides. They were our safety. We would have died if they weren't with us,” acknowledges Mortensen.

“At least when we surf we kind of know what's going on. But I’d never driven a snowmobile before, and I flipped it. Yeah, it was pretty psycho.” 

The quiver. Image credit: Fraser Dovell

For the best friends—as well as for Frost and Williment—making Kamchatka wasn’t just a creative feat, or an extraordinary set of circumstances they found themselves in and were able to squeeze adventure film lemonade out of—though it was definitely both of these things, too. But really, it was the culmination of a childhood dream that started when Mortensen and Duvall were paddling out at North Avalon as 10 year olds. 

“I've watched so many films like this, and I would cry, because you just imagine how that would feel to go somewhere where you feel so out of your depth. To think that’s how we’ve made someone feel is like, pretty special. To give someone goosebumps and inspire them to want to go out and travel.” 

“And with surfing in those winter conditions, there’s just so much that has to go right. You need the waves, the winds to be right, you need the tides, you need it to not be dumping down with snow so you can get in the helicopter and fly and like you need to actually find the wave,” adds Dovell. “When it does go right, you just feel so special. There's no one around. The place is so untouched. I think that's such an amazing feeling.” 

Image credit: Guy Williment

Has it stoked the fire in their bellies? Now that they’ve made it safely out of Russia—which was also looking touch-and-go for some time, with Mortensen admitting “it was getting stuck there, the airports closing and our visas running out” being one of the biggest fears—are they hungry to do it all again in another isolated part of the world? 

“One hundred percent,” says Mortensen without hesitation. Dovell agrees. “Yeah, if we can do it again. It would be pretty cool.” 

Heli-skiing when the surf was flat. Image credit: Fraser Dovell

Dovell (left) and Mortensen snuggle during a camping trip. Image credit: Guy Williment

Image credit: Fraser Dovell

Image credit: Guy Williment

Dovell warms up after surfing the left. The group named the wave Cheburashka, after the iconic Russian classic cartoon character bear, which was printed on Dovell's boards. Image credit: Guy Williment

Mortensen gets some air. Image credit: Guy Williment

Image credit: Guy Williment

Image credit: Guy Williment

Mortensen after a surf. "It feels like I have botox," he remarks. Image credit: Guy Williment

Image credit: Guy Williment

Corners of the Earth: Kamchatka will screen at the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace in Cremorne on March 14 and the Randwick Ritz on March 24; Find out more at cornersoftheearth.com.au