Mimi Miller is Normalizing Black Beach Culture One Awesome Short Film at a Time
Mimi Miller is looking to make Black surfers more visible. Photo: Courtesy Mimi Miller
For The Inertia
Mimi Miller’s surfing love story started in the back of a garbage truck. A mobile, converted-into-a-pool garbage truck that would park in her Detroit neighborhood and hook up to the fire hydrants every summer. It may not have been the Pacific, but swimming in it was enough to get her hooked on the water, and enough to set a journey into motion of founding the first Indigenous Beach Culture Film Festival some 40-years later in Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was her West Indian roots, but Miller knew the bitter midwestern winters weren’t for her. She became obsessed with the sun-kissed appeal of the world of surfing instead. Devouring any and all surf-related documentaries and movies she could find (according to Miller it’s currently around 500 titles), she quickly noticed one recurring thread: a white surfer exploring an amazing break with Black or indigenous children in the background. Always present, but never involved.
“After a while I just felt sick. Like why is it always like this?” she asks. “Sometimes they would give the children a surfboard, sometimes they’d set up a water filter – some kind of giving-back element – but the intentions to me were always for their own agenda.”
When she finally picked up her own surfboard at age 44, catching her first real wave at Huntington Beach after half a year of bodyboarding, she noticed it in real life, too.