The skateboarding sub-culture is a notorious boys club. With the exception of Avril Lavigne’s first few music videos (which don’t, and never will count) women don’t get a lot of recognition in the sport.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some epic female skaters out there like Elissa Steamer, Lacey Baker, and Vanessa Torres, to name a few.

Following the success of her doccie The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle’s first narrative feature film Skate Kitchen celebrates female skaters. Drawing on real-life encounters with Manhattans young female skaters, Moselle captures the daily grind of Manhattan skate culture.

Here’s the Daily Beast:

Hit up a skate park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and, amid the skater bros and dudes smoking weed, you’ll find a tight-knit unit of talented teenage women. With unruly hair whipping their faces and socks pulled up under their Vans, the women belong to an inclusive group of young female skaters self-dubbed “Skate Kitchen.” The name’s a two-fingered salute to all the dickheads who have jeered at them to get off the quarter pipes and back in the kitchen.

These are the badass women cruising and kickflipping through Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen, a narrative film adapted from the girls’ real lives. At its center is Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a Long Island native and skillful skater who religiously follows the girl gang on Instagram.

Breaking her mother’s rules, Camille begins trekking into the city to hang at the women’s stomping ground, skating and smoking and making online videos. She becomes fast friends with the crew, getting particularly close to Kurt (Nina Moran), a no-filter firecracker, and Janay (Ardelia Lovelace), whose comfortable house and kindly dad make for a great summer refuge.

The film retains a sense of authenticity, due in part to the collaborative work that went into conceptualising the script. A chance encounter with a group of young women on a train started it all.

Riding the Brooklyn G train in 2016, Moselle, who’d blown everyone’s mind the year before with her stranger-than-fiction debut documentary The Wolfpack, overheard a couple of teens recounting their past night’s escapades.

…But what really caught Moselle’s attention wasn’t what the girls (who turned out to be Vinberg and Moran) were saying, but what they were toting: skateboards. When they got off at the same stop, Moselle cornered the teens and introduced herself while trying to covertly record them on her phone. “They totally caught me,” Moselle recalls. “I actually still have the video.”

The chance encounter spurred a years-long collaboration, resulting in what would become Moselle’s first narrative feature. To pen the script, Moselle copied down stories from the women’s lives and shuffled them around on a big board. The Skate Kitchen consulted on every step, taking part in periodic improv workshops to ensure each scene felt organic and the dialogue true to their vernacular.

Here’s the trailer:

The film has been compared to movies like Harmony Korine’s cult classic Kids. Like Kids, Skate Kitchen attempts to capture the ins-and-outs of life for teenage girls. As Moselle puts it:

“There’s so many stories about what people think women talk about,” says Moselle. “The people that are putting the films out into the world—they’re not women, they’re men. And I think it’s time for them to realize that people do want to see these films. That they want these stories to live.”

She adds, “What’s cool is that I think a lot of these films are being financed right now, but as far as them actually getting out into the world, it’s a little bit more tough. So I think it’s just about pushing forward.”

Skate Kitchen opens in US cinema’s today.

[source:dailybeast]