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They’ll fall and get banged up and keep going, they’ll tangle with security guards trying to confiscate their boards, they’ll watch skating videos on loop in their dingy apartments with “FUCK TRUMP” scrawled on the walls. What is unclear about Camille’s attraction to Devon, though, is whether she’s interested in him romantically or more intrigued by the way the boys skate - untethered, aggressive, unafraid. Skate Kitchen is locked in a territory war with the young male skaters in their scene, and sometimes their altercations come to blows - especially when Kurt mocks Blake (CJ Ortiz), the de facto leader of the boys, by saying she slept with his mother, and another time when the boys urge the girls to go to the “kiddie pool.” But while Camille, who shares with Janay details of her tomboy youth and who lets slip details about herself that reveal a lack of female friendships (like when she’s shocked the other girls use tampons, hesitantly asking whether they’re toxic), revels in being surrounded by a group of like-minded young women, she’s also intrigued by Devon (Jaden Smith), one of the skater boys who hangs out with Blake. It’s my purse,” sends the girls into riotous, derisive giggles. When they skate down sidewalks together, they take up the whole lane they hit tricks in front of offended strangers, cutting off their walking paths when a guy asks Kurt, “Hey, can you do an ollie?” her monotonous “No bro, I’m a poser, that’s why I have this shit. She recognizes them from their videos, they recognize her from her videos, and a tentative friendship is born, with Camille hovering in the margins of a tightly knit clan of young women who are always up for smoking a blunt, hitting a trick, and fighting with the boys who are either trying to fuck them or kick them out of the skating scene.įirst to warm to Camille is Janay (Dede Lovelace), who introduces Camille to the other young women in their crew, particularly combative and unabashed Kurt (Nina Moran), introduced with the line “That girl just fingered me in the bushes, bro!” Janay’s close friend Indigo (Ajani Russell), with bleached eyebrows that change color with nearly every scene and camerawoman Ruby (Kabrina Adams), who wears a speaker as a pendant and is always encouraging the other girls to “get a clip” to put online. Instead, she decides to finally take the next step in her skating and travel into New York City, where she finds her way to a skate park populated by the all-girl skating group Skate Kitchen. When the film opens, she’s suffered a devastating injury that horrifies her mother, who forces her to promise never to skate again.īut Camille - quiet, observant, and ultimately resolute in her decision making - has no intentions of keeping that promise.
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Moselle has a background in documentary filmmaking, and that shows in Skate Kitchen, which is intimate, immersive, and poetic, following 18-year-old Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a young Latina woman from Long Island who has quietly been amassing a following on Instagram thanks to her skateboarding videos. The film from Crystal Moselle (who previously directed the documentary The Wolfpack, about six brothers locked away in a Manhattan apartment and only interacting with the world through movies) is a fusion of the hazy, gauzy, languid cinematography of a Sofia Coppola film and the girls-against-boys vibe of the first Pitch Perfect, a story of an introverted girl on the outside of a divided subculture who wants into that world. In a summer with an array of movies about womanhood and female identity - The Wife, Never Goin’ Back, Night Comes On, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, The Spy Who Dumped Me, Support the Girls - Skate Kitchen feels like a hybrid.