Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) (2020)

Skateboarding seems to be a theme amongst short films in 2019, as this one and “Kamali” show us just how effective this sport can be when it comes to empowering young girls in a society where their roles and positions are mapped out along more traditional lines. This feature takes us into a school for girls - nicknamed “Skateistan” - where they are being taught to read and stay upright on their wheels, all whilst the resurgent Taliban are imposing themselves more and more in a Kabul that will likely change quite profoundly for both them and their opportunities. From the mouths of a couple of the confidently engaging girls like Fatima and Kashina, as well as through their actually quite brave teachers, we learn first hand how girls as young as thirteen are being taken out of what is still mandatory education and kept at home - ready for hopefully advantageous marriages to men, or boys if they are luckier, that they have never met. This doesn’t offer us a pre-formed judgment of those arrangements, but merely points them out and leaves us to look at families with as many as fourteen children and assess for ourselves. Optimistically, even though these parents may not have had any choices of their own, many are obviously keen on their daughters going to college, or university, and improving their own lots rather than face the same rigid future they faced themselves twenty or thirty years earlier. The children here prove to be very effective spokespeople for their generation and the skating serves nicely as a conduit for their own sort of courage in a society that doesn’t even allow them to go to a football match, much less play in one. This is a subtle critique on a religiously driven patriarchy that offers them, and us, hope. Unfortunately, given what we know six year later, it also points to the fragility of that aspiration.