Le Skate moderne
2013 · 6m · France
Directed by Antoine Besse
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
Far from concrete skateparks, a group of young skaters in rural Dordogne ride their boards through mud, fields and farm tracks, reinventing the countryside as their terrain. Filmed among the farming families they grew up with, their practice becomes a lyrical answer to rural boredom.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's waiting for the avant-garde skateboard essay, but Besse just... lets kids be kids in the mud, which somehow becomes more subversive than any formal trick could be—the real rebellion is refusing to aestheticize rural youth into something Instagram-ready.
A disciplined work in the documentary-as-poem tradition, where the editing rhythm mirrors the skateboard's movement across terrain; the film knows its lineage in pastoral cinema and reinvents it with genuine tenderness rather than nostalgia.
The entire film hinges on Besse's decision to film at ground level, following the boards through actual mud and grass instead of cutting to faces—that single formal choice transforms a local curiosity into something luminous, making constraint feel like freedom.
Reviews
Ce documentaire ne dure que six minutes et pourtant, il saisit complètement son spectateur tant par l'originalité du sujet que par la manière dont le réalisateur axe sa vision et sa narration. Antoine Besse signe par conséquent un film extrêmement lyrique sur une pratique et un milieu qui n'évoque pas habituellement la délicatesse.