“I think the world we live in can be harsh. It really drives people into working and earning and getting into a place where they don't feel satisfied. Surfing and riding waves and being in the environment and exploring the beautiful coastlines, there's a freedom there and a true beauty and I think that's very alluring and it's deeply fulfilling for us as human beings,” says Jolyon Hoff, director of the film You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.

Watching You Should Have Been Here Yesterday is like a rhythmic and nostalgic daydream. It immerses you in a time of blossoming surf culture with its excitingly creative surfers, its innovative board designs and its free spirit.

The film doesn’t have a main character. Instead it uses Australian surfing culture as a character, tracking its rise and fall throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. It uses restored footage of old surf films, which were filmed with 16mm cameras, and interviews with various people including surfing filmmaker Alby Falzon and writer Tim Winton.

“I wanted people to think more broadly about the culture of surfing and the culture of the era and what was going on. Films, especially surf films and adventure films will hook onto a character and follow a very tried and tested arc of the hero's journey or an adventure to go and conquer a wave. So it was a conscious choice to make a film like this because I wanted people to bring their own thoughts to it,” says Hoff.

The restored film is gloriously rendered on screen, especially the various shades of blue in the crashing waves, you never would have thought so many blues existed. The footage also embraces all of the small imperfections of the old film reels such as light leaks and scratches and this contributes to the nostalgic feeling of it all.

“We scanned about 150 hours of lost Australian surf film footage and it’s been scanned at archive quality by Kade Bucheli, who spent 14 months on it, and also overseen by Billy Wychgel, who was the colour grader for Lord of the Rings,” reveals Hoff.

The film makes you yearn for a period that has been and gone, but it doesn’t fall into the familiar mistakes of these types of films where they only focus on the good parts of the time period.

“In this film I wanted to engage with that time period honestly and deal with what happened when drugs were introduced and also the problem of women being ostracised from surfing. They were two elements of surfing that I was pleased to bring up in the film,” says Hoff.

Ultimately Hoff says he wants people watching the film to fall in love with surfing all over again and bring that into the present because he believes surfing culture has never been better.

“There’s all different types of surfing like competitive surfing, longboard surfing, old people surfing, kids surfing, bodyboarding, kneeboarding. Everything is surfing and is part of that community so the title is a bit of a misnomer because it's not ‘You should have been here yesterday’, it's ‘You should be here right now.’ You should be enjoying and being present in this moment and what is going on in surfing now,” says Hoff.

You Should Have Been Here Yesterday is playing as part of the Travelling Sydney Film Festival at the Warrawong Gala Cinema on Sunday July 28. It is truly an immersive and mesmerising depiction of a time in Australian history that doesn’t seem to be talked about enough.

Jolyon called in for his interview with The Bugle from Indonesia where he is working on a documentary film about refugees who have been stuck there since the Australian Government stopped the boats.