Mind the Gap (2018)

Directed by: Bing Liu | 93 minutes | documentary | Starring: Keire Johnson, Bing Liu, Zack Mulligan

Often the best documentaries come from images or stories that have come about more or less by chance. When the quiet Bing Liu decides at a young age to capture the worries of his skateboarding group of friends on camera, he probably wouldn’t have thought that he would have won an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary ten years later with ‘Minding the Gap’.

In the hopeless depths of the economically stagnant town of Rockford in Illinois, Liu slowly unfolds the harrowing stories behind the lives of his friends and himself. The result is a penetrating documentary about the indelible influence of a broken family, which at the same time reads as a parable about the raw underside of American society.

While ‘Minding the Gap’ initially seems to unfold as an intimate glimpse into a group of friends brought together by the skateboard, over the course of the story the documentary increasingly turns into a harrowing account of issues such as child abuse, failed parenthood and how these vicious circle seems to repeat itself continuously. Striking are, for example, the asides in which Liu speaks with Keire’s mother, who seems to fall back again and again in the same hopeless love adventures, or even more so in the turbulent love affair between Zack and Nina, herself on the threshold of doomed parenthood. .

The sometimes destructive influence of family is made tangible in ‘Minding the Gap’ in a heartbreaking way. Consider a scene in which Keire reveals remarkably resignedly how his brother stole his hard-earned savings. But also, for example, a story by Nina about the lack of any kind of affection in her youth, and the uneasiness that this entails in new situations. Or how Bing lets his brother give a tour of their childhood home: while wandering through the corridors, the viewer almost experiences the pain that tore the youth of these boys. Perhaps the most painful, however, are the scenes between Liu himself and his apparently timid mother, about the indelible terror that the stepfather unleashed on the family. It eventually culminates in a heartbreaking apotheosis that will leave no viewer untouched.

And yet Liu cleverly manages to never put the heavy subject matter on the viewer’s neck like too heavy a millstone, because he never loses sight of the perhaps utopian beauty of hope. Think of the moment when one of the boys proudly displays his new car, and later in the film finally dares to burn the ships behind him. Or how Liu finally seems to be able to come to terms with his painful childhood.

Although ultimately it is mainly the powerlessness that reigns in ‘Minding the Gap’, nowhere so aptly illustrated as in an archive image in which Keire tries to kick a skateboard to smithereens after an argument. What at first seems to present itself as a tragicomic aside, can later be read with knowledge as an allegory of the painful impotence of the children. The characters are ultimately always on their own; family provides hardly a safety net, and the government and economic situation only seem to make matters worse. With that ‘Minding the Gap’ offers another penetrating insight into the broken-down America. None of the protagonists have to knock on any doors for repairs: debris is at their own expense. Flight seems like a utopia. Except on the skateboard.