The feature-length documentary King Skate received an enthusiastic response from the audience after its screening on Monday. A group of seven skateboarders, including Englishman Shane Rose, and director Šimon Šafránek came to KVIFF Talk to discuss the film.
The documentary, made using 30 hours of archive footage and 20 hours of new material, captures the skateboarding phenomenon, which took off in then-Czechoslovakia in the mid 1970s. Karlovy Vary, a.k.a. Czech California - with its famous pool, where it was first possible to try out a skating bowl and experience the feeling of riding waves – contributed to the promotion of this turbulent wave of enjoyment of movement, but it was also at loggerheads with an oppressive regime.
Director Šimon Šafránek was inspired by the book Prkýnko na maso jsme uřízli (We Sawed Off the Meat-Cutting Board) by Michal Nanoru and Martin Overstreet, which contains the testimonies of pre-Velvet Revolution skateboarders. The archival footage was obtained from the protagonists themselves. “I borrowed a film camera from my brother, who was studying film school. First we filmed competitions, but later it occurred to me that it would have more meaning to capture the environment and atmosphere of the events,” revealed Vojta Kotek.
In the 1970s, the boys learned about skateboarding from domestic magazines, which made skateboarders out to be the antithesis of the idea of orderly and properly-raised youth, or from American magazines, which portrayed skateboarders as unemployed drug addicts. Skateboarding became a way of life for them, which is why, for example, they see the introduction of this sport into the Olympics as a commercial trap that will bring money into the sport and ruin the atmosphere in the community. According to Shane Rose, this is nicely described by Tony Hawk who said: “The Olympics need skateboarding much more than skateboarding needs the Olympics.”
