Girlhood, performance and risk: Learning to skateboard in a war zone (if you’re a girl) and the action sports documentary

Abstract

This article examines the Academy award-winning documentary short Learning to skateboard in a war zone (if you’re a girl) (2019), which depicts the girl participants at a purpose-built indoor skating facility in Kabul, Afghanistan, run by Skateistan, a sports nongovernmental organization (NGO), until the Taliban returned in 2021. The article uses the film as a case study example for a research project interrogating a recent trend in documentary production, namely films seeking to disassemble established gender, class, race, ableist and ageist norms in the representation of action and lifestyle sport participation and performance, in this instance by tapping into contemporaneous discourses of empowered girlhood prevalent particularly in the US. Looking first at the distinctive production contexts that shaped Learning to skakeboard, and then closely at key sequences of the film, the article shows why and how it offers a striking counterpoint to the panoply of skateboarding documentaries that overwhelmingly represent risk-taking young white Western men, and which work powerfully to shape the associations and meanings of the pursuit. In so doing, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarship analysing contemporary documentary film’s representation of risk through forms of embodied performance. As we watch Afghan girls learning skate tricks, Learning to skateboard foregrounds the dynamics of performance, and its viewing, in ways that implicitly critique what kinds of bodies are most typically seen in play and in peril in action and lifestyle sports documentaries.