Crystal Moselle's Skate Kitchen to screen at GYFF

Teen skateboarding movie Skate Kitchen – a hit at Sundance earlier in the year – will make its Scottish premiere at this year’s Glasgow Youth Film Festival

Article by Jamie Dunn | 31 Jul 2018

We already know that this year’s Glasgow Youth Film Festival (14-16 Sep) will kick off with riotous Scottish zombie musical Anna and the Apocalypse. The full programme isn’t released until 15 August, but The Skinny can reveal a second title in the line-up: hazy teen skateboarding movie Skate Kitchen, from Crystal Moselle.

Moselle is best known for her debut The Wolfpack, a jaw-dropping documentary following a group of movie-obsessed teen siblings who had barely left their New York apartment, sometimes not stepping outside for months, even years at a time. To entertain themselves, they would remake their favourite movies like Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight using homemade costumes and their family camcorder.

Moselle’s new film – her first fiction feature – also concerns a group of New York teens who move in a pack, but they couldn’t be more different. Skate Kitchen’s focus is Rachelle Vinberg’s Camille, a talented but introverted thrasher who appears to be the lone female skater at her local park in suburban Long Island, which is overrun by sniggering adolescent boys. The film follows her as she’s accepted into a tribe of badass female skaters in Manhattan, who seem to rule their city’s streets.

While Skate Kitchen is a fiction film, it’s very much based on the lives of the young women who make up the cast, who are part of a skating crew in real life, called The Skate Kitchen. “I just love sitting in a room and listening to them talk,” Moselle says of working with her young novice actors. “They’re so funny and their conversations are amazing. That’s just the realism of girls and I wanted to show it completely candidly, not with a male gaze, not with the perception of what people expect girls to talk about, but really be honest of what girls are together – they’re companions and they have each other’s back.”


Skate Kitchen screens 15 Sep, GFT, as part of Glasgow Youth Film Festival, and is released 28 Sep by Modern Film

Tickets for GYFF's opening film Anna and the Apocalypse are available from 1 Aug

The full GYFF programme is released 15 Aug – more info at glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival