Malden resident turns traumatic experience into documentary

Film warns about riptides and celebrates an extraordinary female surfer in Puerto Rico

Special to The Advocate

Five years ago Malden resident Mark Micheli watched as his wife battled for her life against a riptide far off the shore on a beach in Puerto Rico. Within seconds he saw a woman on a surfboard racing towards her. “The surfboard was moving so fast I thought it might be motorized,” he said. “When she reached her, I saw Trish pull herself onto the board and then I saw a big wave crash over them, and then I didn’t see anyone.”

The near-death experience of his wife and her subsequent rescue by surfing legend Paloma Quintana is told in Micheli’s documentary short, “Paloma, Angel of the Sea.” A trailer of the movie can be seen at PalomaAngelOfTheSea.com.

Micheli, a former editor at The Boston Globe who now teaches multimedia journalism part-time at Emerson College, kept in touch with Quintana over the past five years, communicating with her via Facebook Messenger and using Google Translate. He soon learned that Quintana routinely rescues people from rip currents — which are nearly continuous — on Jobos Beach in the town of Isabela in the northwest corner of the island.

Not everyone is as lucky

His wife, Trish Micheli, a former second-grade teacher at the Beebe School and volunteer coordinator at The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, did some research and found news articles about children and adults drowning in riptides there over the years. “It was scary, reading about all these tragedies and thinking about the danger I was in,” she said.

Female surfing pioneer

The couple also learned that Quintana is a female surfing pioneer who competed in what was once considered a male surfing sport, longboarding. Recognizing that there were many women who wanted to surf but were intimidated by “macho” males, she founded the “International Association of Female Surfers in Puerto Rico” in 2004.

“I knew this was an extraordinary story that needed to be told and thought about doing a documentary over the past five years,” Mark Micheli said. “But I also knew it would take a lot of work and some money.”

So it wasn’t until he applied and received a small grant from Emerson College last year that he decided he could do this. Last January the Michelis, along with their friends Malden residents Carlos and Monica Calvo, flew to Puerto Rico, where he filmed the documentary in five days.

“I couldn’t have done it without Carlos and Monica,” Micheli said. He explained that Carlos, who is a professional translator, provided translations for both Micheli and Quintana during a video interview conducted on the balcony of his apartment rental. It was then that he learned what drives Quintana to continually risk her life to save others.

“She opened up to me, explaining her motivation,” he said. “It was a very emotional moment that I’m proud of capturing on film.”

Film festival dreams

Micheli said he applied to about a dozen film festivals in hopes of getting more people to learn about this extraordinary woman and the dangers of riptides. Some are local, including the prestigious GlobeDocs Film Festival held at The Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square in the fall.

“That’s the one I’m hoping the most to get into,” Micheli said. He explained that he and Trish attend the “documentary shorts” part of the GlobeDocs program most every year. “We love it. They show about a half-dozen shorts, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.”

Other festivals he applied to are farther away, including New York, California, Puerto Rico, Dublin and Belgium. “It’s a long shot,” he said. “But how often am I going to get a chance to have a film of mine shown on the big screen? I’d be happy to get into just one of the festivals.”

To find out where and when the full documentary short will be shown, sign up for newsletter updates at the bottom of the film’s website: https://palomaangelofthesea.com/