The Devil's Toy Redux Lyon
2015 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Fred Mortagne
Genres: sports
Tones: contemplative
Skateboarder Flo Mirtain performs a catalogue of tricks on a ledge in Lyon, from backside tailslides to smith grinds.
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A six-minute skateboard catalogue sounds like the most boring premise imaginable—which is exactly why Mortagne's choice to make it contemplative instead of triumphant is so quietly radical; he's turned a trick video into something that actually breathes.
The film's restraint echoes a lineage of durational performance documentation, from structuralist cinema through to contemporary sports portraiture, where the ledge becomes a stage for formal investigation rather than spectacle.
What lifts this from a basic trick edit is Mortagne's decision to hold on Flo's body between attempts—that stillness, that weight—transforming a sequence of technical accomplishments into something almost meditative about mastery and repetition.