Why you need to see this new documentary about an all-girl skate crew

In her acclaimed 2015 film The Wolfpack, director Crystal Moselle documented a group of brothers whose movie re-enactments helped them understand a world beyond the New York apartment to which they were confined by their paranoid parents. So her follow-up, Skate Kitchen, is the perfect counterpoint: a sun-drenched drama about a group of girls skating round the same city, taking full advantage of their freedom.

Almost eerily, the girls’ skate bowls are located in the Lower East Side (LES) park just a few minutes away from the high-rise where The Wolfpack’s Angulo brothers were effectively held in captivity. Both films focus on the bonds, high spirits and savagery of young adulthood, but this time round Moselle shows an outdoorsy NYC childhood, the polar opposite of The Wolfpack. Was it purposeful? “Everything just happens, then we find the parallels,” she explains in her northern Californian drawl. “Like, how strange is it that I ended up with girls after the boys? There’s definitely something happening in the universe that attracts me to groups of youthful kids who are passionate about something. I love that everything’s this constant discovery and they’re seeing things for the first time and it’s really exciting for them. It makes me feel nostalgic.”

The “rowdy-ass girl crew” (as Jaden Smith’s character Devon describes them) are a real-life group of late-teen friends whom Moselle spotted on the subway and filmed for a Miu Miu campaign, before deciding that they were so special she needed to make an entire movie with them. She teased out conversations and events from their lives and constructed her own scripted version, which the cast act out with perfect conviction.

The film centres around Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a skate-obsessed teenager who’s been banned from pursuing her passion after a nasty “credit card” injury (when your skateboard flips up and hits you in the pelvis area) has her rushed to hospital and her mother (the brilliantly sassy Elizabeth Rodriguez, aka Diaz from Orange Is The New Black) prematurely worries that another accident will stop her daughter bearing children. But it’s not long before Camille is lowering her board out of her window with shoelaces and hopping on the train to a girls’ skate day in the city. There she quickly falls into a ready-made friendship circle which initially alleviates adolescent feelings of sadness and loneliness, but ultimately comes with its dramas. The film’s glowy, glory period evokes the heightened feelings of a teen fantasy, but a sense of doom starts to creep in with the appearance of cute “fuccboi” Devon.

Moselle’s ability to conjure up some of the stomach-sinking moments of adolescence is a mark of her sensitivity as a director – so what was it like playing one of her teen subjects? “She fucking sucks man!” says Nina Moran, who plays Kurt, the wise-cracking tomboy lesbian of the group. “Oh, are you recording!?” she laughs. Moran and Ardelia Lovelace, who plays sweet-hearted Janay, agree that filming with Moselle was a joy. “She’s awesome. And it was a pretty easy transition because we were used to being around her,” says Lovelace, with Moran adding, “We weren’t acting – we were just skating around. We’re used to listening to her.” As for Jaden Smith, the only cast member with acting experience, he says it was unlike any other movie he’s worked on: ”This set was just so special because it really captured that raw emotion of the people that were ‘acting it out’. That’s what I really love about the film – it feels so real and so raw and authentic.”

Even though she’s 38, Moselle is still fully tuned in to the joys and terrors of the teen years. “It’s finding depression for the first time; the world starts letting you down. When you’re younger, you think everything’s possible, then you realise the hardships and you start to doubt yourself. It’s this real yin and yang.” Her connection to those formative years suggests a certain rawness. Did she have a particularly emotional time when she was the girls’ age? “I got bullied by older girls and I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if there had been social media. With all the older girls, there was this weird tradition when you got to school in freshman year – they had this one day called ‘Freshman Day’ when you’d come to school and they’d write ‘F’ on your forehead. They’d target the pretty girls – the ones the older guys were paying attention to. And all the senior girls would pass me all the time and they’d be like, ‘Whore.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, I’m a virgin!’ I was 14 and they were 18 and they were so mean. It was a lot like Dazed and Confused.”

But despite the fallouts and #FAKE hashtags that unfold in the film, Skate Kitchen is globally pushing a positive teen-girl message (despite some comparisons, Kids this is not), and since its festival screenings and US release, it’s had a wider societal impact.

“When I first met them, there were barely any girls skating [at LES] at all – maybe 20 girls or less,” says Moselle “Now they’re just popping up everywhere and girls are really starting to skateboard.” Moran backs her up, saying that the percentage of female skaters has gone up considerably at the LES skatepark, where they did much of the filming. “It was, like, five percent girls before the movie and now it’s getting to, like, ten percent, maybe 15 percent.”

Everywhere they travel with the film, Moselle says, “there’s always a group of girls who show up and are super-excited and inspired.” But the popularity of Skate Kitchen isn’t limited to girls who “fucking shred” (skate well) – young women are happy to see a film that puts real female talk front and centre. There’s frank discussion of tampons, an assessment of what makes a “valid vagina” and a deadpan dismissive, “Damn, too many penises in the way” at the skatepark from Nina. “They were just part of their conversations and I would turn them into scenes,” says Moselle. “I think it’s something that you don’t usually hear women talk about in movies – the things we have to deal with, like periods and insecurities.”

One reason we probably don’t hear many women talking about such things in movies is because not enough movies are made by women in the first place. Moselle thinks that’s changing in the branded film space but, she says, “Hollywood is the problem,” with male directors still dominating.

“Say Marvel will put females up for all the films that have female leads, but not the film that has a male lead. There are a lot more women directing these days, but the biggest problem is that we’re telling these female-driven stories which people in higher places – like acquisitions – are not as interested in, so they’re not really wanting to put them out in the world in an impactful way.”

She thinks the #MeToo movement is making waves in the wider industry though, by helping to change the environment in which women operate. “It’s created a lot of fear for men, which I guess at the end of the day is creating the change. Everybody is stepping on eggshells around everything – they’re scared. I talked to a male producer and he was like, ‘Literally, I won’t even look at a woman on set because I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.’ I guess you’ve got to make big dents for there to be actual change.”

“As females, you grow up thinking that navigating harassment from men is just a part of being a woman. I grew up thinking that and I look back and I think, ‘That is so fucked up!’”