by Greg Kaczynski

Created on: April 29, 2008   Last Updated: April 30, 2008

Surfwise: Refreshing and Challenging

At first glance, Surfwise appears to simply be a documentary about a crazy old man who, at one point, decided to be a surfer, and dragged his family with him. While those are the facts, Surfwise is a tale for every single one of us, a powerful story about following one's heart and the unbridled joy and the inevitable backlash for doing so. At a time where our country's lifestyle lingers on the brink of an unpredictable outcome, this story blows away the accepted myth of the status quo.

Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz's life began normal enough, he was born to a Jewish family in Galveston, TX in 1921, when he was 13, his family moved to San Diego where Dorian became an avid surfer. He attended Stanford, got his M.D., and eventually became president of the American Medical Association in Hawaii. Much is made about his strong moral stance on being a doctor, he was of the rare breed that didn't focus on his benefit more than his patients'. Many in the film recount his utilitarian philosophies, and this, no doubt, had much to do with his incredible success.

His personal life, though, was a failure, he had gone through two divorces and he felt no love for monetary success. Feeling unsatisfied, he gave it all up, he left Hawaii, quit the AMA, and moved to Israel where he lived in the desert, surviving off of the land for an entire year. While there, he introduced surfing to Tel Aviv and became locked in to a new way of life, one focused on eating well, exercise, and listening to the truth within his heart.

Determined to understand his failed marriages, he went on a conquest to learn everything he could about the opposite sex (he describes this process infinitely more colorfully in the film), and in the process, met his wife, Juliette. Sparks fly, everything changes, they get married, and spend the next couple of decades wandering the surf, raising a brood of eight boys and one girl, all eleven of them living in a 24-foot long camper.

This is their story. A family that spent their entire time growing up together outside of the American norm. Dorian, while never sending them to school or in any way integrating them into society at large, raised them under his very strict guidelines of raw diet and exercise. One son describes it as "Doc" never wanting his family to be shown up by a monkey; if he saw a baboon eating an apple and not the skin, then, by God, they would not eat the skins of apples anymore.

They also became a family of expert

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