Skateboarding is Not for Girls

Do not be fooled by that attention-grabbing title. Skateboarding is little more than a secondary subplot in North Macedonian writer-director Dina Duma’s second feature. Instead, the sport chiefly functions as a metaphor in Skateboarding is Not For Girls, symbolising the freewheeling dreams of Duma’s pre-teen schoolgirl tomboy heroine Adela, who throws herself into the skater subculture partly as a defiant reaction against male-dominated tradition, but also in a long-shot attempt to help her financially imperilled family.

Mostly shot in Skopje, capital city of North Macedonia, Skateboarding is Not for Girls covers familiar territory for Duma. With its teen-girl focus and almost entirely female cast, it recalls her moody coming-of-age debut Sisterhood (2021), which North Macedonia selected as it official Oscars contender. This sophomore project had its world premiere at Tribeca in June, where it won the Nora Ephron award, a hefty cash prize for exceptional young women film-makers. It makes its European debut closer to Duma’s Balkan homeland over the coming week, screening in official competition at Sarajevo Film Festival. Addressing well-trodden narrative tropes, but well acted and timely in its quietly angry empowerment message, it should enjoy plenty more festival play, with modest commercial prospects to follow.

The heart of the story is a contemporary social-dilemma plot revolving around 11-year-old Adela (played with luminous charm by screen novice Efkjar Abaz), her older sister Zara (Džefrina Jašari), and their long-suffering mother Esma (Simonida Selimovic). Adding insult to injury after months of unpaid rent and mounting bills, the girls learn their long-absent dad has fallen for another woman while working in Switzerland, and is never coming home, and nor is his money. After failing in her bid to raise cash by selling their preposterous wreck of a car, a vintage Communist-era Yugo only held together by string and prayer, Esma begins to think the unthinkable, Her last resort option to clear her debts means “selling” Zara into marriage to the son of a wealthy Bulgarian family.

Through Duma’s eyes, these ethically dubious transactional weddings have both a tragic and comic dimension, even though Esma is essentially pimping out Zara in exchange for financial security. But Adela is affronted at the prospect of losing her sister to an ancient patriarchal pact, loudly pointing out the shortcomings of her potential new brother-in-law. “He’s not cute and his mouth stinks,” she protests. “He has nice eyes,” her mother counters, damning the boy with faint praise. No spoilers here, but Duma is not steering us towards a happy-ever-after feel good rom-com ending.

Duma gathers a fine ensemble cast, many of them non-professionals cast from Skopje’s majority-Muslim Romani community. Her extensive background research also included witnessing close-up the antiquated tradition of “marriage markets”, which continue widely across the Balkans. These contracts comes with creepy conditions attached, including the bride’s virginity, which the newly-weds are expected to prove by displaying the bloody sheets from their wedding bed in public.

To her credit, Duma lays out her gently feminist critique of commodified female bodies and stifled potential with an impressive degree of empathy for all the players, favouring droll farce over preachy polemic or soapy melodrama. She also peppers the story with flashes of dreamy beauty, mostly in the recurring split-screen aerial shots of Adela gliding through the city’s grungy fringes on her skateboard, lost in woozy slow-motion reverie, or quietly sobbing during a school choir session. Striking vignettes like these hint at a deeper, more poetic, more emotionally complex film than Duma ultimately delivers. Skateboarding is Not for Girls could have used more of these lyrical touches to elevate a well-intentioned drama that is never less than charming, but pretty conventional overall.

Director: Dina Duma
Screenwriters: Dina Duma, Lidija Mojsovska, Teona Strugar Mitevska
Cast: Efkjar Abaz, Simonida Selimovic, Džefrina Jašari, Ganimet Abdula
Cinematography: Frédéric Noirhomme
Editing: Alain Dessauvage, Pierpaolo Filomeno
Music: Jura Ferina, Pavle Miholjevic
Producers: Labina Mitevska, Sébastien Delloye, Danijel Hocevar, Vanja Sremac
Production companies: Entre Chien et Loup (Belgium),Vertigo (Slovenia), Terminal 3 (Croatia), Sisters and Brother Mitevski (North Macedonia)
World sales: Kinology, France
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition)
In Macedonian
82 minutes