The Journey

Since we had only arrived in Stuttgart a month prior, we were still getting to learn a lot about the city and the communities within it. So we figured a doc was the perfect way to do that.

Skateboarding has always been something that has interested me, skate in film is the subject of some of my favourite work (Minding the Gap, Mid90s, Skate Kitchen). So of course, I brought it up in the brainstorm session and we proceeded to explore that idea along with a few others.

Here’s what we knew, there was a skate community in Stuttgart, we just had to find it, so we began to research. We scoured the local places, wrote down anywhere we remembered seeing people skateboarding. I remember looking through Stuttgart skateboard groups on Facebook that were eerily inactive.

After talking to a lot of people and scouting some places in person, we ended up finding this one group of women about our age (in their early 20s) in a local skate park. The group was perfect, they had the style and the talent, so we pursued that, excited that we finally had a subject. This did however fall through due to scheduling and commitment.

This left us hanging and panicky. I asked our fellow exchange student, Ruben (an eccentric British fellow), to ask any girl or women he saw at the skateparks if they’d want to be in the project and if he could pass on their info to me. He would message me every few days with some leads. So I took the time to get to know the individuals, there weren’t many, but there were some Skype calls, coffee, the works.

We wanted to make a documentary of a group of girls who skate, Cinéma vérité style. Sanja however was great at sharing her own story and as a new skater, she didn’t have a set group of people she skated with everyday, she was at the outsides of the community finding her space.

I’d personally always wanted to learn how to skateboard and her perspective was really intriguing and fresh. It’s different seeing and hearing from someone who is already successful in something, we always do, but to hear it from someone who is very similar to us, beginning and failing, trying and being resilient was kind of transformative to me.

So we shifted the project to match the story we were telling in a way that was comfortable for someone who’s not used to being filmed. This differed a lot from what we initially intended, a group who already had all their questions answered, all their tricks learned. Instead we were about to showcase someone who was courageous in taking the first steps, the journey we don’t always see.

We ended up telling the story of her earnestness, her sheer will, with the goal of showing people that they could do it too. Not just skateboarding, but anything they didn’t see people like themselves in, whether it was in the community, the media, or the career.

And then I bought my own board.