Bing Liu, a teenager passionate about skateboarding, starts recording his day to day with his best friends. Starting as simple entertaining videos about skateboarding tricks, Liu soon realizes that his group of friends has much more in common than what meets the eyes. All feel excluded from their family, all compensate their familial shortcomings with this friendship, and all uses skateboarding as a way to forget about their problems. As their teenage years are going by, they face with more or less success the difficulties and responsibilities that arise with adulthood, using the tools at their disposal.
 
After recording material during many years, Liu made a compelling documentary which won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2018, received an Oscar nomination and won over 40 awards. Minding the gap positions itself as a coming of age documentary that explores the fate of the three protagonists who continuously question their past as a guide to understand their present. The “family video” aesthetics of the footage converts each scene into intimate fragments that allow the audience to connect much more with the protagonists and their respective stories. The emotional loneliness that is visible in all of them is one of the reasons why the young filmmaker decides to keep on documenting their lives. Minding the Gap represents a form of filmic therapy, a unique way to heal their wounds.

 

2018: Sundance Film Festival: Special Jury Prize – Breakthrough Filmmaking
2018: National Board of Review (NBR): Top Five Documentaries
2018: Independent Spirit Awards: Nominated for Best Documentary and Truer Than Fiction Award

Year: 2018

Runtime: 100 min

Country: USA

Direction: Bing Liu

Cinematography: Bing Liu

OST: Nathan Halpern, Gordon Quinn

Cast: Kiere Johnson, Bing Liu, Zack Mulligan

Genre: Documentary

Language: VOSE

Subtitles: Pau Velasco

Contact: Dogwoof

Website

Category
2019