A film festival that started with a few nights of surf movies at Encinitas's La Paloma Theatre has grown into a week-long takeover of North County beaches, storefronts and stages. The Sessions Surf Festival, formerly known as Solento, returns for its sixth year running from September 12 through September 19, spreading events across Encinitas and Solana Beach with a newly beefed-up music lineup alongside its film and art programming.
Founder Taylor Steele, a Solana Beach native who broke into filmmaking in 1992 with the genre-defining surf movie *Momentum*, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that music is the festival's biggest addition this year. Steele's original film, which paired high-energy editing with punk rock from bands like The Offspring and Blink-182 while spotlighting surfers Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, according to San Diego Magazine, set the template for a career built on marrying surf culture with live music. That same instinct now shapes the festival's sound this year, with performances from Osees, Unwritten Law, Bully, Mojave Rush, Jack Shields, Mt Warning, Yoke Lore and Emily Afton, per the festival's core lineup announcement.
From a Tequila-Sponsored Film Night to a Week-Long Festival
The event traces back to September 2021, when Steele launched the original Solento Surf Festival as a three-day nonprofit gathering at La Paloma Theatre, donating all ticket and beverage sales to environmental groups including the Rob Machado Foundation, the Changing Tides Foundation and SurfAid, according to BevNET. That festival took its original name from Solento Organic Tequila, the spirit brand Steele co-founded in 2019 around the Spanish idea of “slow sun,” a philosophy meant to encourage the kind of patience surfers need while waiting for waves, as detailed by Whitewall.
The festival has since traveled well beyond Encinitas. In November 2024, Steele brought the event to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a multi-day run that included panels with world champion surfer Lisa Andersen, a stop Hoodline covered in its own piece on the Florida surf fest debut. Then in June 2025, the festival expanded internationally with an eight-day run on Australia's Gold Coast featuring film premieres, art exhibitions and panels at Burleigh Heads and HOTA, a move tied to the five years Steele spent living in Australia, according to Inside Gold Coast.
Steele's South by Southwest Ambitions
Steele has been explicit about where he wants this to go. He told the Union-Tribune he wants to grow the Encinitas festival into something resembling South by Southwest, the Austin, Texas event that brings together creatives, academics, musicians and others across culture, politics and technology. That ambition is showing up in the new programming: Steele's vision for this year's Sessions now includes environmental conversations, subject-matter experts, music performances and movie screenings, and he has said he wanted to bring more of New York City's art scene into the local mix.
Under the Sessions name, the festival now runs film screenings and panel discussions at La Paloma Theatre from September 17 through September 19, plus five days of artist showcases from September 14 through September 19 at the Outerknown pop-up shop inside Hansen Surfboards. That shop is itself a North County institution, founded in 1961 by shaper Don Hansen in Cardiff before relocating in 1968 across from Swami's in Encinitas and growing into the county's largest surf shop at 20,000 square feet, according to the Encinitas Boardriders Club.
Beach Day and the Count Down Cup Kick Things Off
The festival opens September 12 at Seaside Reef in Solana Beach, a reef break along Coast Highway 101 known for fast, hollow left-hand waves that became famous in 1990s surf films, per Go Surfing SD!. That beach day includes the Count Down Cup surf competition, which has multiple divisions designed for both competitors and spectators, followed by an evening gathering with live music, entertainment, food and drinks, per the festival's news release.
Steele has described the festival's September timing as intentional, calling it a nod to the “locals' summer” that follows peak tourist season. He told the Union-Tribune the later date is meant to make the festival more accessible to San Diego locals once summer vacation crowds thin out, a scheduling choice that also lines up with the City of Encinitas's push, alongside its Chamber of Commerce, to drive shoulder-season economic activity to small businesses through its Visit Encinitas tourism initiative, launched in 2024, according to The Coast News.
A Historic Theater Anchors the Film Side
La Paloma Theatre remains central to the festival's identity even as the event grows around it. Built in 1927 and formally opened in 1928, the Spanish Colonial Revival theater was among the first in San Diego County to install sound equipment for talkies, and over its history it has hosted stars like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin as well as concerts by Jerry Garcia and Eddie Vedder, according to Cinema Treasures. Steele grew up attending surf film premieres there before eventually screening his own work on that same screen.
Full scheduling, ticketing and additional details for the festival are available at sessionssurffestival.com, according to the festival's own listings. The Union-Tribune article, written by staff writer Luke Harold, ran in the paper's Encinitas Advocate news section.
