Holding On is the brainchild of Sydney directors and old friends Simon Bruncke and Trent Beattie.
It centres on the 'Skid Kids', six bodyboarding-mad kids from Cronulla who found fame in the 70's.
The road to making the film began when Bruncke graduated from university and started working for Taylor Steele, a veteran producer of surf movies.
"He took a chance on me to run his Australian operations, which was mostly marketing, sales and distribution on all his films, putting together premieres and things like that", Bruncke said. "I loved it".
That gig led to the director working with Garage Entertainment, the outfit behind 2007's Bra Boys (Holding On is also narrated by a famous actor, though this time it's David Wenham instead of Russell Crowe).
Garage is now looking after the film's distribution in Australia/ NZ, while Xtreme Video has taken other territories.
While Bruncke was distributing action-sports documentaries of every kind, he kept waiting for one to come along about bodyboarding.
"I always had the idea to do this film but never really had the means or the skills to be able to do it properly".
He proposed the idea to old friend Beattie at a mate's party.
"Simon sent through the storyline and his key scenes and what he was looking to do", said Beattie, "and I thought it was a really interesting story to tell".
The pair first contacted Chris Stroh, a surf photographer who "had about 80 percent of the archival footage that we needed", said Bruncke.
The film was crowdfunded via Kickstarter as well as self-funded.
The key was getting the six Skid Kids, now contemporaries of the directors, on board.
"Three of them were really keen and didn't care what we offered them", said Bruncke.
"Two were really worried about their reputations and how they'd look, and another one was just completely impossible and difficult. It was really challenging".
Post was completed through Chrome Creative, and the film premiered to a packed house at the Cronulla Sharks Leagues Club last month.
"Obviously when you've been making something over years and you're premiering for the first time, you're not sure how it's gonna go down", said Beattie.
"When we first rocked up to that auditorium and looked at the size of it, we didn't expect we'd even half fill it. But we completely sold out. People were ringing us asking for tickets".
"On the night it was a massive buzz. Obviously we did it in Cronulla and it's a Cronulla story, [there's] a massive surf community out there so they were all pretty pumped. And it was a licensed premises, so…" (laughs)
Riptide and Coastal Watch as well as board manufacturers have climbed aboard to promote the film, which has just completed a 15-stop national tour with members of the Skid Kids in attendance for Q&A's.
"We sold out in Coolangatta, in Byron, in Perth, went very close in Brookvale, so we've just wrapped that up", said Bruncke. "Mornington Peninsula was the last stop on Friday last week".
"We talked to a lot of key bodyboarding retailers, and they really wanted a few weeks to be able to sell the DVD for us, so we've offered that to them, and then we're gonna open up to online sales on a range of platforms from iTunes to Vimeo on Demand and TheSurfNetwork.com".
Holding On will release on VOD April 4.