This documentary follows the lives of three friends over the span of a 12 year period who bonded through skateboarding as an escape from their fraught home life in Rockford, IL. Throughout the movie we watch the young men transition from adolescents to adults and all the responsibilities that come with that. What seems to be a documentary about skateboarding youths turns into a deeper message of abuse. Unbeknownst to each other, all three leads had suffered abuse from their fathers/step-fathers growing up and skateboarding was their escape. Further into the documentary we learn that one of the young men was abusing his girlfriend/baby’s mother, which was a shock to the other two. The title “Minding the Gap”alludes to the exploration of the crossover from adolescents to adulthood.
This documentary is was filmed in an interesting way. Not only did Bing Lui direct, film and produce this Minding the Gap, he is also one of the three young men. What I liked about some of the filming is that a lot of the early footage was used from skate videos Bing used to film when they were kids. The movie mainly focuses on the the other two, Keire and Zack, and then Bing does something journalist/documentarist don’t normally do and comes out from behind the camera and shares his own story of abuse. This documentary had a wide positive reception and many thought it should have received an Oscar and was also on Obama’s favorite movie list from 2018.
One interesting thing I read in an interview with Bing Lui is that in 2016 one of the main characters Zack, Bing’s friend, became a Trump supporter and he wanted to build that into the arc. He thought it was interesting that Zack left home when he was young because his dad was becoming more conservative and ironically, Zack does the same in adulthood. Another filmmaker talked Bing out of building that arc because he said it would take away from the freshness and be a disservice to the film. I’m happy Bing was talked out of that arc because I do think it would have been a disservice and not as widely received since Trump is so polarizing.