“Representation isn’t just about visibility, it’s about belonging,” Tahitian longboarder Vaimiti Teiefitu says in her new short film “Malla Moda,” which follows Vai to India to meet and surf with pioneer Ishita Malaviya. The duo longboard across India’s coastline, sharing some of Ishita’s ethos behind her work promoting surfing in India and their shared experiences of womanhood.
Vai and Ishita first connected when they were both on the ambassador team of the same brand a few years ago, but never met in person until they landed in the Andaman Islands to shoot Malla Moda in early 2025. The plan was to find some perfect waves together in the isolated island chain, but things did not go to plan. The only ferry to the island with surf wasn’t departing for a week, meaning they would lose a large chunk of their shoot window. So they flew back to mainland India to seek out a pointbreak on the east coast.
“Ishita texted a surf club in Vizag — on the opposite coast from where she lives — and asked if there was anything happening there. The swell forecast looked promising, so we thought, ‘Let’s just go.’ No accommodation booked, nothing. Two guys from the local surf club met us at the airport, found us a rooftop house, and basically took care of everything,” Vai said.
Filmed and edited by Simon Levalois-Bazer and supported by Protest Sportswear, you wouldn’t know from watching that the project was anything but smooth sailing. Showcasing the vibrant east Indian coastline, the film shares some of Ishita’s story as India’s first female surfer and the grit and determination it took to not just become a surfer but also be part of building surf culture at a time when surfing was almost unheard of across the country.
Vai talks about belonging in her voiceover and how seeing someone like Ishita, a female surfer with brown skin, has made her feel less alone in the world of surfing. “Growing up in Tahiti, there weren’t many girls surfing, so I didn’t really have a role model, I mostly looked up to guys,” Vai elaborated. “When I first heard about Ishita, it struck me: she’s older than me, and for the first time I was looking at someone who actually looked like me… a different closeness I hadn’t felt before. Growing up surrounded by mostly blonde, light-eyed Roxy girls, meeting her made me feel less alone in this industry.”
Vai also identifies the universality of womanhood — a sense of commonality that comes with being a woman, crossing cultural, geographical and linguistic boundaries. “That one actually found me rather than the other way around. Representation was something I planned to talk about from the start — womanhood wasn’t,” Vai reflected.
Simon Levalois-Bazer
“I realized we’d lived remarkably similar experiences and that struck me as kind of wild: a Tahitian woman and an Indian woman, from what should be almost opposite worlds, sharing the same experiences. Being a woman isn’t tied to a country — it’s something universal. There’s a connection that happens instantly when you sit down with another woman, no matter how different your lives look on paper.”
The surfing is also beautiful in Malla Moda. Glittering seascapes and smooth longboarding — it’s a picturesque snapshot into an unlikely surf destination.
Related: Still Stoked: The Festival Bringing Together Black Surfers From Across the Globe