#archival footage
It’sGo Skateboarding Day, and what better way to celebrate than to highlight films throughout Sundance Film Festival history that feature skateboarding.
Founded in 2004 by Don Brown and the International Association of Skateboard Companies in California, the holiday gives skateboarders an opportunity to get outside and practice the sport with the help of participating cities worldwide.
Here are just a few films that capture the creativity, passion, drive, and so much more that skateboarding can ignite.
(Above) 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Hala dir. by Minhal Baig
Hala is her father’s pride and joy. Dutiful and academically gifted, she skillfully navigates both her social life as a teen in Chicago and her obligations as an only child to Pakistani immigrants. When she meets Jesse, a classmate who shares her love for poetry and skateboarding, their romance is complicated by her Muslim faith and a father who is prepared to arrange her marriage according to their family’s cultural tradition. As Hala begins to challenge these customs, her parents’ own lives start to unravel, testing the power of Hala’s flourishing voice.
2018 Sundance Film Festival, Skate Kitchen dir. by Crystal Moselle
Introverted 18-year-old skateboarder Camille lives on Long Island with her single mother. After a startling injury, she promises her mother she’ll hang up her board, but the pull to skate is too strong. On Instagram she discovers “The Skate Kitchen,” a subculture of girls whose lives revolve around skating, and bravely seeks them out… Skate Kitchen precisely captures the experience of women in male-dominated spaces and tells a story of a girl who learns the importance of camaraderie and self-discovery.
2001 Sundance Film Festival, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography dir. by Stacy Peralta
Today skateboarding is omnipresent. Take a walk down any street in any town, and you are destined to see someone riding a skateboard. Well, it wasn’t always like that. In the early ’80s, skateboarding was fading away until Stacy Peralta brought a profoundly talented group of outsiders together and dubbed them the Bones Brigade. This documentary chronicles their epic rise, using awesome archival footage and moving first-person accounts from Brigade members Steve Caballero, Tommy Guerrero, Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, and Rodney Mullen, among others.
1999 Sundance Film Festival, Dogtown and Z-Boys dir. by Stacy Peralta
Skateboarding has crossed over into the mainstream population due in large part to the humble beginnings of a group of eight teenagers in an area of Santa Monica called Dogtown. It was there that this mismatched gang of kids from broken homes formed a group known as the Zephyr Team aka Z-Boys… Reuniting the original crew 25 years later enables us to hear in their own words what it was like before x-treme sports existed.
All film stills courtesy of respective film titles.
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Let’s take a lesson from Mr. Rogers for World Kindness Day and remember that: “The greatest thing we can do is to help somebody know that they’re loved and capable of loving.”
WatchMorgan Neville’s 2018 Sundance Film Festival documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and get inspired to do something nice for someone today on World Kindness Day.
With his gentle voice and heartfelt words of wisdom, Fred Rogers served as a compassionate surrogate father for generations of American children who tuned in to public television. He believed in love as the essential ingredient in life and was able to assist kids through difficult situations armed merely with handmade puppets suggesting tolerance and acceptance. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers made speaking directly and openly to children his life’s work, both on and off his long-running show. He was at the forefront of a movement devoted to meeting the specific needs of children and was considered a radical back then for saying, “I like you just the way you are.”
Animated sequences are peppered between archival footage of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and interviews with Fred Rogers’s family, friends, and colleagues. Examining Rogers’s legacy, Academy Award–winning director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) offers a deliberate and beautiful tribute to an authentic human being and provides a much-needed salve for these often-fraught times.
FindWon’t You Be My Neighbor?on-demand.
Film still by Jim Judkis, courtesy of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
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Working out helps me see…
Experimenting with this guy for an upcoming NFT
PREMISE: The trees. Silent sentinels. Watchful protectors. The most observant of all flora. That’s why they’re called the detectives of the forests. Deliberate, thoughtful, and precise, trees take their time, but they always crack their case. This slow-paced British series was developed as a way for the BBC to monetize their massive library of archival footage of trees.
CHARACTERS: The two protagonists are Maple, a hot-sapped loose cannon, and Elm, a goody-two-shoes who always goes by the book. These two couldn’t be more different, but they became partners when their seeds were dropped in the same area, and now they must learn to work together over decades of slowly growing alongside each other.
Fir was introduced as a potential love interest for both Maple and Elm, but wound up being used as little more than eye candy. The showrunners were criticized for objectifying Fir, who was rarely involved in any major storylines and whose characterization was thin and one-dimensional. Fir was tragically cut down in a Christmas special (S03.E06 – “Decked All To Hell”).
NOTABLE EPISODE: Maple and Elm spring into action when beavers start chewing up saplings down by the lake. Maple confronts the beavers by slowly unleashing leaves upon the ground over the course of weeks. But the beavers are wise to the plan, and horribly maul Elm while Maple is forced to watch (S02.E04 – “Leave It To Beavers”).
CATCHPHRASE: “I got too many rings for this shit.”
TRIVIA/MISCELLANY: Benedict Cumberbatch voiced all the characters, including the sinister chainsaw.
