DECEMBER 2
FILMS & GUEST SPEAKERS
1:00 PM
Short Film
THE WOLF PACK
12 mins | Directed by: Nick Waggoner, Zac Ramras
High in the San Juan Mountains above Silverton, Colorado, a pack of runners roams, jogging through meadows, hiking over mineral-stained peaks, ducking through forests and exploring the rugged landscape of their backyard. It’s the Braford-Lefebvre family — mom, dad and three kids — who have used running both as a healing mechanism and a tool to help them experience life together. The Wolf Pack chronicles a family raised the right way — on fresh air, high peaks and the wonder of the outdoors.
Feature Film
MINDING THE GAP
96 mins | Directed by: Bing Liu
Rockford, Illinois is a city wracked with unemployment, low wages, a population exodus and violent crime, particularly the domestic variety. It’s a hard place to grow up, and for the young men at the center of Bing Liu’s masterful Minding the Gap, survival came in the form of skateboarding, which afforded them camaraderie and freedom from the brutality of home life. “We formed a family together to look out for each other … because no one else was looking out for us,” one says at the beginning of the film. But what begins as a film about the salvation of skateboarding becomes something much deeper as the boys turn from teens to men, each experiencing his own reckoning with family, trauma, race, repression and the consequences of adulthood while trying to escape the cycles of the past. This unflinching coming of age, which spans four years, will get under your skin and stay there.
Post-film Q&A
Q&A SKYPE WITH BING LIU
2018 Filmmaker – Minding the Gap
The instability of young filmmaker Bing Liu’s childhood has grown roots in his passion for cinematography and documentary. He began making skateboard videos as a teenager which quickly grew into more than a simple hobby. His latest work Minding the Gap (Mountainfilm 2018) tracks the gritty life journeys of friends he’s made in the concrete jungle of the skate parks of Illinois. The film won the US Documentary Competition Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking at Sundance Film Festival. His ongoing work with Kartemquin Films includes acting as story director for a Steve James mini-series, American To Me (2018). The series takes an intimate look at America’s charged state of race, culture, and education within one of Chicago’s most diverse and progressive public schools.
