Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
A jaunty ride through London’s skateboarding scene, The Skatebook pulls from a wide range of perspectives to explore a culture that, per one interviewee, is ‘60 per cent community, 40 per cent skateboarding’. The UK filmmaker Sofia Negri surveys newcomers, veterans and everyone in between for the work, pairing their words with lively hand-drawn characters who ride in and out of her sketchbooks, and through live-action skatepark scenes. From these voices and images, a complex portrait of the skating landscape emerges – one in which the learning horizon is endless and most people are welcoming, but, even amid what one old-schooler calls a ‘watered-down’ culture, some members can still be a real drag.
Director: Sofia Negri
video
Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
video
Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
video
Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
video
Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
video
Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes