Sunny Abberton,

Surfer

Social and Community Entrepreneur

Producer, The Bra Boys

Sunny Abberton in LA for the Bra Boys premier

Sunny Abberton ~ Living on the Big Screen - Thoughts From Director

As the Bra Boys premiere train keeps rolling on, a lot of people ask me what it’s like to now have my family’s story so visible and public. When the project first came out and I saw my life story on the big screen, it was quite heavy and took a lot of getting used to. Being recognized by strangers and such was a new experience for my brothers and me. But as it became more common, the exposure helped us explain to the public where we come from. With the exposure, we are able to help other kids who are going through similar experiences. Being able to shed light onto the issues and help other people has been one of the main reasons that inspired me to make the film.

When the project was still in its infancy, I didn’t have any cares as to what people would think about our story and background. The main reason I wanted to do the film was to show the truth behind our lives and our background. It was my goal to capture the entire community, our strengths, our weaknesses and the passions that run throughout it. We felt that we had an obligation to show our side of the story and capture the everyday lives of the people that were living through it.

Our scene and community were portrayed in a pretty ugly light by the media prior to the film. I wanted to create the film to justify our position within the Maroubra community and to tell the entire story. This need to justify my community and myself is nothing new to me; I’ve been standing up for myself since I was eight years old. It’s still the case in Maroubra in terms of being discriminated against. If you get ten kids together down at the beach, the officials instantly deem you a gang. But the film isn’t about the hostility between the surfers and the police; it reaches much deeper than that. The film aims at capturing the unity amongst the community and our ability to rise against adversity. That’s why I strayed away from focusing on the legal issues that happened over the course of the film. If you want that information, look on the Internet. It was my goal to present a universal story that is not limited to our specific community. I think that people of all generations and backgrounds can relate to the story and hopefully the film can serve as inspiration to them.
--Sunny

Courtesy of FUEL.TV

Credit: BraBoysfilm The online community

Sunny Abberton

Sunny Abberton (Director, Writer, Producer) is a 34-year-old first-time writer, director and producer.

Sunny was born in Sydney, Australia, as the oldest of four brothers, and spent his formative years between Maroubra’s housing estates, New Zealand and a hippy commune in Nimbin. Sunny, and brothers Jai and Koby, were taught to surf by their grandfather and would find the beach their only escape from a troubled and destitute home life.

Sunny showed talent as a young surfer and left school at age 15 to pursue a career in the sport. Sunny competed on the competitive ASP Pro Tour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which he gained a reputation as one of the best junior surfers in the world. Fortuitously, this early career path took him to countries such as Brazil and South Africa where he was introduced to class injustices and economic oppression for the first time on a global scale.

While he was in Brazil, he discovered a children’s reading book written to teach the poorest Brazilian children about the Landless Movement, which was a turning point for Sunny. Through this piece of literature, he first gained an insight into the power of the arts to have the potential to enlighten and inform - particularly the young and the oppressed. Sensing parallels between the injustices experienced by the lower echelons of these societies, and the poverty he had witnessed in the housing commission estates of his native Maroubra, Sunny set out to create a voice which could inspire the youth of his own backyard. Thus the idea for BRA BOYS was born.

Meanwhile, back in Maroubra, an escalation in tensions among various Sydney communities was beginning to manifest in violence on Sydney’s eastern beaches. Gangs would regularly travel to the beaches and it sparked a series of bloody confrontations. The youth at Maroubra banded together to defend their beach and create a brotherhood to protect one another. Sunny was part of the resistance and, together with a small group of mates, formed a group they termed the Bra Boys.

From his days on the Pro Surf tours, Sunny had a wealth of experience in front of the camera, and he used this exposure to learn the tricks of the trade, through a mixture of osmosis and curiosity. Years of filming surf travelogues on home video cameras also helped to equip him for his first feature documentary shoot.

It was about six months into the filming of the documentary that his brother Jai was charged with murdering a Sydney standover man, a blow later amplified when his brother Koby was charged as an accessory after the fact. Together with a local production company Sunny spent an additional three years filming the central figures within the Bra Boys community, including the legal struggle of his two brothers.

He collected hundreds of hours of film out of which the Bra Boys documentary was compiled. Sunny was the writer, producer and director of the film.

As the informally appointed patriarch of both the Abberton family and then the larger group known as the Bra Boys, Sunny had always felt a deep responsibility for both the internal and external perception of the group. Through this documentary, Sunny hopes to give inspiration and a voice to the youth of Maroubra, and others in Australia who have grown up in similar circumstances, as well as provide an arena to share their experiences in a public forum.

Sunny currently lives at Maroubra Beach in Sydney, Australia. BRA BOYS is his first feature film and he currently has another two projects in development, one of which is a feature adaptation of the BRA BOYS documentary. (Credit: Bra Boys official website).

Website

Bra Boys

Profile

The Bra Boys

News

26th February 2008

Sunny Abberton accepts the ‘The Surf Movie of the Year Award’ on behalf of the Bra Boys at the 23rd annual Australian Surfing Awards

Google News search for Sunny Abberton

Media Man Australia publicly commends Sunny on his fantastic social and community endeavors

Sunny Abberton and Greg Tingle form Media Man Australia at Universal Peace Centre

"Universal Peace Centre Retreat was a truly awesome experience and it gave me time to really chill out, breath easy and relax from my otherwise often hectic schedule. Whether your a surf pro, or busy exec, if you want to get back to nature, eat and be treated like a king and experience real peace and relaxation, I recommend at least a few days at the Universal Peace Centre Retreat." Sunny

Patricia from Travel Tourism Media had the opportunity to meet Sunny at Universal Peace Centre and experienced that by him becoming a public figure and coming from the living history he came from, this did not take away his kind human escense.