Skate Kitchen by Crystal Moselle

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SKATE KITCHEN

2018 / 106min

DIRECTOR: CRYSTAL MOSELLE

Q&A with Crystal Moselle and Nina Gregory, Senior Editor for NPR's Arts Desk

In the first narrative feature from The Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle, Camille, an introverted teenage skateboarder (newcomer Rachelle Vinberg) from Long Island, meets and befriends an all-girl, New York City-based skateboarding crew called Skate Kitchen. She gets in with the in-crowd, has a falling-out with her mother, and falls for a mysterious skateboarder guy (Jaden Smith), but a relationship with him proves to be trickier to navigate than a kickflip. Writer/director Moselle immersed herself in the lives of this real-life skate crew and worked closely with them to develop the story, resulting in an authentic, poetic, contemporary coming-of-age tale, punctuated with hypnotic skate sequences. 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.

Crystal Moselle is a New York based director best known for her Sundance, Grand Jury Prize award winning documentary, The Wolfpack. In the last decade she has been working with short-form storytelling for publications such as Vice, Nowness and The New York Times. Her first narrative feature, Skate Kitchen, premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures in August. Nina Gregory is an editor at NPR where she oversees coverage of film and assigns and edits coverage of tv, art, dance, books, food and culture. She was born and raised in Hollywood and wrote for skateboarding magazines back when people subscribed to them. She credits skate and youth culture for giving her her start as curious young writer.

Preceded by two shorts produced by THINX that spotlight the endurance and adaptability of women. One Woman - Grace Robertson (2018 / 6min) and One Woman - Oona Tempest (2018 / 6min).

Introduction by Maeve Roughton, Head of Content at Thinx

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