Chile's arid mountains, wild coastline, perfect pointbreaks and rich culture is the canvas on which El Mar, Mi Alma paints a journey. El Mar, Mi Alma explores the coast of Chile through a 16mm lens, as Dave Rastovich and Joel Parkinson and friends surf their way south to the rhythm of vibrant strumming. The sea occupies an honoured place in Chilean life and is woven through the cultural fabric of the nation. Awe-inspiring scenery and amazing waves are intercut with interviews with local commentary on environmental issues. The tunes of Pablo Neruda's poems add layers to the experience and there is an essence of reverence for nature. El Mar, Mi Alma, in english My Sea, My Soul, is more than a surf film. It's a raw and rich cinematic experience.

We chatted to Lennox based filmmaker Steve Jones about the ideas and the making of El Mar, Mi Alma – My Sea, My Soul…

What was the idea for the film?

The project began as an environmental campaign along the coast of Chile. My partner, Tatiana, and I worked closely with Surfers 4 Cetaceans and Dave Rastovich to put together a tour along the coast to meet with communities and discuss the local coastal environmental issues.

The act of riding a wave and being in harmony with nature, with the ocean is something that is at the core of this film and it's metaphorical to how we interact with nature holistically.

The film has layers, it's a blend of surfing, ecology and art, and the soundtrack takes the imagery to another level. The soundtrack is mostly by a Chilean artist, Manuel Garcia, who grew up in this town in the north of Chile playing guitar by the docks, and made his first guitar from fishing line that he stole from the fishermen.

Why did you choose to take the more traditional avenue of filming on 16mm film?

We teamed up with Dave Homcy who believes "with film you make history, on video you make news." Dave brought all his 16mm camera gear; an Arri High Speed SRII a high speed film camera, and a Bolex, and a Milliken, a whole suite of really great 16 mm cameras and lenses.

Sometimes someone will take off on a wave and and they might fall off halfway along the wave, and you've just burnt fifty feet on film! There's a lot of stuff that ends up not useable, so it's kind of wasteful and costly.

Whenever the guys were surfing the film camera was rolling. I think there was about 70-80 hours of video footage in total, and 10 hours of raw film footage. The quality of the film footage has such beautiful depth and rich textures and colours.

We were on the road for four weeks and we only had 3-4 days in each town, it was just luck that everywhere we went we scored incredible surf. In the North, the heavy slabs and reef breaks, in the central and down south all the sand bottom left hand point breaks.

Whenever the guys were surfing we were shooting, we weren't waiting for good light or for the next day when the conditions might have been better, when we had to pack up and go we couldn't wait for the conditions to get better in that particular location.

Pablo Neruda is a world famous Chilean poet, political figure and the father figure of Chile, who wrote poems are about the sea. Neruda said, "The quintessential search of modern man is to seek harmony with nature and to realise that human utopia." We've embraced that philosophy in the film. We took three of his poems and co-produced them into songs. One of the songs is a duet with Jack Johnson, where Manuel sings the verses in Spanish and Jack sings them in English.

On location in Chile?

A lot of what we captured is literally an archive of a place and a time, it's a piece of history. We visited Chile in the end of 2009, so the imagery and photographs are a historical reference to how the coast was before the tsunami. Places like Punta de Lobos, where there were all artisanal fishing huts and shacks and they had built all these cool old sculptures down on the beach there, that was all decimated and destroyed in the tsunami.

Chile is extremely long and narrow wedged between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. It is exposed to an enormous amount of open ocean swell, so there are always waves.

The landscape in the north is the driest desert in the world, the Atacama Desert, an incredibly bone dry place where it hasn't rained for hundreds of years. People don't even have roofs on their homes. You can be sitting in someone's lounge room and looking up at the stars.

It was amazing to see these big red-orange fireball sunsets setting over the sea. That's something that really stood out to me.

El Mar, Mi Alma is on tour down Australia's coast, check out El Mar, Mi Alma's website for tour dates.