Sept. 22 through Sept. 25, Minnesota will play host to the Duluth Superior Film Festival. The fest will feature 90 films from the Midwest and around the globe. Jessica Edwards will be there and her documentary “Skate Dreams” will have its Minnesota premier.
It’s the first feature documentary to capture the story behind the rise of women’s skateboarding. She’ll be joined by one of the film’s five featured skateboarders Nicole Hause of Stillwater. Edwards joined Host Cathy Wurzer to talk about the film.
How many documentaries are made about women’s skateboarding?
When we started making the film in 2018, I knew of one other project that was was created to sort of showcase how limited the media coverage was. And that that film started out as a thesis project and it was it was very limited in its availability. And we I couldn't find anything else amidst the dozens of other films, both narrative and documentary, that showcase really women at all.
Why did you decide to tell the story?
Well, it's probably about as personal as you can get. My six year old daughter decided that she wanted to start skateboarding when we began to make the film and she was really the impetus to it, really looking for some positive narratives and some really incredible female role models that she could look up to as this young girl.
I couldn't find that in the mainstream media landscape but I was finding it all over social media. So social media really became this kind of catalyst for this community of women, non-binary people, people of color and all different kinds of humans who didn't look like the standard skateboarding stereotype to find each other.
Courtesy of Ebru Yildiz
Director of "Skate Dreams," Jessica Edwards.
And so that really became very interesting to me. My daughter would never really feel like she wasn't included, that was really interesting. She just kind of got her little pink skateboard and went out with the crew skating and that sort of disconnect between what it was like for me growing up and what it was like for her was something I wanted to explore a little bit deeper.
Did you get to have a front row seat to the community with Nicole?
I mean, absolutely. You know, Nicole was so open and welcoming. And like many of the skaters, I think that they're so used to kind of being sidelined by sponsors, by media that they just went out and did it on their own. And so anybody who showed interest to, that was all that mattered.
And, you know, that was extremely new five years ago when we started. It's changed slightly over the past five years, for the good in my mind. I mean, more women have gone pro in the last five years than I think in like the 20 years previous previous to that, including Nicole Hause who just went pro for real skateboards last weekend, which is really, really exciting. So we're really, really proud of the hometown hero.
Courtesy of Skate Dreams/Film First
Nicole Hause of Stillwater, Minn.
But it's still hard to break through, right?
I think that the change that I've noticed in the last two years, it is easier now than it's ever been. But the caveat of that being, of course, that it was never easy. But you do have very big sponsors and companies paying attention to women in a way that they never have before. And we can only applaud that, right? Everybody just wants there to be more access. And that's frankly, what the kids are excited about.
One of the sort of silver linings of COVID for American kids was that they could use skateboarding and or be introduced to skateboarding. The industry really exploded during those couple of years. And you saw more kids get on a skateboard than you have in the recent past. The industry itself is paying attention to what the kids are excited about and what they're seeing is really from social media. So there's kind of a direct way that skateboarders can kind of connect with their with their audiences, with their crews, that then the big brands pay attention to.
Is your daughter still skateboarding?
She's still skateboarding. You know, she's got lots of other interests now too. But Nicole Hauser is her hero. When she found out that she went pro last week, she was super excited. We have a screening in Duluth and we also have one in Stillwater on Sept. 25. So come and hang out with us, see the movie and then go skate.
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