She then assigned the skaters each a role that was based on, she says, “a version of themselves at one point in their life.”īy using real skaters in her story, Moselle lends a new level of authenticity to the film. She immersed herself in the girls’ world and then proceeded to draft a script using the real experiences of the eponymous collective as inspiration. Abandoning the confines of her comfort zone of well-developed documentaries, shorts, and commercials, Moselle instead opts to use fiction to explore reality. The result is Skate Kitchen, a coming-of-age story that explores gender, sexuality, friendship, and family through the lens of New York City’s skate scene. The film won over Sundance viewers with its daring perspective and soon after, Moselle set out to extend the story into a full-length narrative project. Through the camaraderie of the collective, the skaters are able to overcome the rampant sexism that prevails. Moselle’s final piece highlights the struggles female skaters endure when they approach the skatepark on their own. Tasked with finding a subject that showcased the power of femininity, the collective was a clear choice for the director. That chance meeting with the collective led to “That One Day,” a video short for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales project.
She soon learned that the group of girls was not casual about the sport they were serious enough to have formed a collective called The Skate Kitchen in order to establish a female-centric community for skaters. It wasn’t their colorful personas or outfits that drew her in at first-it was their skateboards. “I let the spontaneity of life sort of take me.” While riding the subway one day, she noticed a group of quirky young girls. “I always just happen to stumble upon it,” she says. Taken by their distinctive appearance, she approached them and discovered that their story was even more captivating than their unique exterior.Īs in all other cases, Moselle let her instincts guide her towards new material. By chance, Moselle stumbled upon the boys while walking down First Avenue on one of their rare days outside. Through her lens, viewers are introduced to the Angulo brothers, a group of cinema-crazed boys with plenty of imagination, strengthened by their confinement in their family’s small apartment. This initially became clear in 2015 in Moselle’s breakout documentary The Wolfpack, which serves as a master class in the power of observation. The final results are illuminating-her films are always centered around fully formulated, four-dimensional characters with a singular vision and point of view. She immerses herself in her subjects for extended periods of time and doesn’t begin the portrait until she is hyper-aware of every curve of their figures and every shadow that is cast upon them. The filmmaker and documentarian Crystal Moselle approaches her work like a sixteenth-century Renaissance painter. CRYSTAL MOSELLE SHINES A SPOTLIGHT ON FEMALE SKATERS
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