I met Jordy in circumstances that felt like a warning label, under the flickering lights of a small Nicaraguan clinic, where his mate drifted in and out of consciousness as a two-inch gash on his forehead was tied back together. Six Australians, shirtless and sunburnt, had walked straight out of the lineup and filled the room with nervous energy and thick accents.
So, when Jordy told me he was making a surf film, I thought, yeah, that tracks.
I didn’t need a trailer. I already knew the tone. The film was going to feel exactly like that room.
And it does.
Lost in Central is loose, unfiltered, slightly feral. Jordy narrates the beast and from the voice alone (maybe the haircut, too) you’re thinking, how the hell did he make it out alive? The story sits in the hands of someone you’re not entirely confident in getting you to the end in one piece. And that’s precisely the beauty of it.
You feel the 12-kilo bag digging into your shoulders. A board tucked under your arm. You’re wedged between Jordy and his best mate, Copper Puttergil, bumping down roads along the west coast of Central America. No production crew. No videographer. No safety net. Just two twenty-two-year-olds with an idea and a borrowed tripod.
“From Mexico to Nicaragua, the coastline delivered some of the best waves we have ever surfed,” they say. “But the film is built around what it took to get there.” That’s the spine of it. The waves are firing, yes, but they’re not the only point.
“Every session came at a cost. Long days waiting for short windows of swell.”
If they didn’t make friends over cheap Corona and convince someone to jump behind the lens, it was a one-hour-in, one-hour-out deal. Surf. Sprint up the beach. Swap the camera. Repeat. As Jordy puts it, “You don’t want to be sitting on the beach wigging out, you want to be getting tubed.”
This wasn’t their first swing. After pouring most of their savings into African Surfari, their first edit, they landed in Mexico low on funds. “Our film budget was five hundred dollars thanks to Mambo, and we borrowed a camera and tripod.”
They might not have had the budget, but they had an idea: tell a story, not just stack clips that only surfers would sit through. As they say plainly, “Lost in Central is not about stacking clips. It’s about the coast behind them.” The edits are tight enough that your non-surfing mate won’t click off but layered enough that you feel the grind beneath them. There’s hiking. Fishing. Long drives. Culture. Sunburn. And, obviously, a ridiculous amount of surfing.
By the time they reached Nicaragua, they were tired of getting ripped off and their boards only just making it to the next destination in one piece. So, they hired a small, battered car “that swayed in the wind with fifteen boards strapped to the roof.” Most days they’d lock themselves out, break back in, and trigger a siren that “would not stop screaming until we smashed the unlock button enough times for it to calm down.” It earned a name: “the car that would not shut up.”
But somewhere between the chaos, something solid formed. “Through fun waves and cheap Coronas, we built a crew without meaning to.” By the end, “there were days where ten of us would be posted up under palm trees.”
The travel itself, they admit, “was chaos. It was uncomfortable. And it made every wave feel earned.” That’s what lingers after the credits roll. Not just the barrels, though there are plenty, but the weight of them. The sweat behind them. The sirens. The hunger. The strangers who became friends because two kids asked for help and handed them a camera.
Lost in Central is two twenty-two-year-olds filming each other across four countries, figuring it out as they went. It feels less like a polished surf film and more like being dragged along for the ride. A little more connected to community. A little more connected to the dream.
And somehow, against all odds, we all make it out alive.
