Ceibo follows Pacha Light through her home country of Ecuador as she rediscovers her place in the world. Accompanied by fellow surfer, Lucy Small, and filmmaker, Maddie Mennings, the trio uncover more than just hard-to-reach waves. Lucy reflects on the experience of filmmaking in Ecuador.
When I saw the ‘reconsider need to travel’ warning slide into my inbox the night before I was set to fly to Ecuador in early 2024, I thought the six months of planning that’d made it happen were all for nothing. Early the next morning I was meant to fly from Sydney to Quito for a four-week shoot for the making of surf documentary Ceibo, but the security situation in the small South American nation had taken a dark turn. Cartel activity relating to a prison break had sent the country into lockdown.
The president declared a state of emergency and established a nighttime curfew, while embassies advised their citizens to make their way out of the country.
I still went to Sydney airport in the morning awaiting further developments. Our team group chat was blowing up. Our main protagonist, surfer and activist Pacha Light, was already in the country and unsure what we should do.
Pacha sending some spray in Montanita
Our director of photography, Maddie Meddings, was on her way to London to get ready to fly out. Without a solution, I boarded my flight. By the time I landed in Los Angeles, things had escalated – the news was plastered with images of balaclava-clad people taking newsreaders hostage in the southern Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil.
Maddie wanted to pull out, ‘What if we can’t really shoot anything because of the lockdown?’ she reasoned. Pacha said it was calm where she was, holed up with friends in the Andes. I was delirious with no sleep and needed to make a decision. ‘Let’s just give it 24 hours’, I suggested as I checked into an airport hotel. By the next morning, nothing else had happened. We were on.
Lucy, Carolina, and Pacha on a long walk to surf in San Cristobal in the Galapagos
When we arrived the airport was quiet, manned by a few extra police, but things seemed calm. We were eager to get out of the city, so headed for the mountains, to Cotacachi, where Pacha was born. Here, there was no evidence of the days of chaos that’d unfolded elsewhere. At the time it was a great source of stress – a year later as we put the finishing touches on the film, the security situation was far from the defining factor of the story. In fact, we didn’t even include it.
What we have instead is a deep exploration of a country that has played an important role in the story of our planet.
Ecuador’s Important History
While only a small country, within Ecuador’s borders are some bucket list destinations: The northern Andes, the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Galapagos Islands. We were headed for all of them, as well as traversing the mainland coastline in search of surf.
The film would be an exploration of Pacha’s story as she untangled her identity and figured out her place in the world while reconnecting with her country of birth. Now looking back, and reliving the trip through the process of putting together the film, it’s also a deep examination of activism in different forms.
Ecuador is a very political place. Indigenous communities in particular have been forced to engage in multigenerational struggles to protect their territories from mining companies coming in to extract fossil fuels and minerals, and in general, people seemed very engaged with the government activities of the day. The fight for nature is central to this, with the struggle for land rights defining Ecuadorian history.
In 2008 Ecuador became the first country on Earth to recognise the rights of nature in its constitution.
Just a few months before we arrived, the nation voted in a referendum to keep oil reserves in the ground in the territory of the Woarani people, deep in the Amazon rainforest.
Our Journey Across Ecuador
Despite a rocky start, our journey was epic. We didn’t encounter any security problems and it became evident that the international news reports were somewhat of a betrayal of this beautiful country. We visited Pacha’s first house, deep in the forest of the Andes in a place called Intag Valley, where she lived for the first years of her life.
We were taken through the years of struggles the indigenous communities of the region have been through by Gen Z indigenous activist, Muyu Flores, who showed us that activism can take the form of being open and sharing and deeply caring for the Earth’s precious places.
From the Andes, we headed to the coastline where we surfed with Olympic surfer Mimi Barona, who was dealing with the recent loss of her older brother Israel.
Mimi Barona, Ecuador’s most decorated surfer in history
Despite going through the hardest period of her life, Mimi shared with us so joyfully. Mimi is a born leader and has paved the way for the future of Ecuadorian surfing. It was so evident how loved and respected she is in her hometown of Montanita, and we all had a lot to learn from her way of leading by example.
We then headed east to the Amazon Rainforest where we stayed at a research centre called Iyarina, founded by the family of Kichwa woman Elizabeth Virkina Swanson Andi.
Elizabeth & her aunty hold yuka on an island in Rio Napo in the Amazon Rainforest
Elizabeth took us through the devastating damage to her home river caused by upstream gold mining that has boomed since the pandemic and is sending heavy metals flowing into the Rio Napo, the wide river that Elizabeth’s community lives along. The community doesn’t know if it’s safe to drink the water, eat the fish, and grow food as waterways around them are declared dead due to heavy metal contamination. The majority of mined resources in Ecuador are sent overseas, and here we could see the human and environmental costs.
For Elizabeth, the strongest form of resistance she was able to take was just to stay, practise her culture, and be part of her community, preserving their culture and language.
Finally, we headed out to the Galapagos Islands, which have got to be one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth. We surfed and sailed with national park guide Carolina Pesantez, who shared her fears that climate change could wipe out entire species that exist only in the archipelago.
National park guide, Carolina Pesantez, at home below the surface in the Galapagos
The Galapagos is truly one of the world’s wondrous places – weird and wonderful creatures populating the arid shores of the bright blue Pacific Ocean. We surfed and dived and basked in the beauty of these tiny islands in the vast expanse of the sea.
From the Galapagos, we headed back to Quito and reflected on our trip from the heights of a mountain overlooking the second-highest capital city in the world. The people we met along the way made it clear that there are many ways to make change and if we all do what we can, big change is achievable.
A friendly sea lion in the Galapagos
Ecuador was both heartbreaking and joyful, full of resistance, resilience, and immense beauty – this was the Ecuador we wanted to share with the world.
Ceibo is a feature-length documentary directed by Lucy Small and Maddie Meddings, filmed and edited by Maddie, produced by Lucy and co-produced by Pacha Light. It’ll premiere in Sydney on April 8th, followed by national tours of Australia and the UK. These tours will also fundraise for organisations doing important work in the regions we were lucky enough to film in.
Photos by @maddiemeddings
