The Devil's Toy Redux Los Angeles
2015 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Greg Hunt, Benny Maglinao
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative
Venice and Santa Monica compete over skateboarding's birthplace, a sport born when surfers sought practice during the low season.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with skateboarding's California origin story, but Hunt and Maglinao spend ten minutes on a territorial pissing match between two beach towns—it's the kind of deliberately unglamorous sports documentary that refuses the usual triumphalist mythology, which is genuinely refreshing even if the premise itself feels a bit thin.
A deceptively formal piece that locates skateboarding within the lineage of surf culture and urban geography, using the Venice/Santa Monica dispute as a frame for examining how communities claim ownership of cultural practice—the contemplative tone and structural restraint suggest filmmakers alert to documentary tradition and genuinely interested in complicating origin narratives.
The real move here is how the film lets geography and local voice do the argumentative work rather than narration, trusting the specificity of place-bound testimony to carry the weight—it's a small-budget doc that understands that the most interesting choice is often what you don't explain.