This slight, scrappy documentary follows an all-female crew of downhill skateboarders on a road trip to northern Turkey. To the risk-averse, their sport looks suicidally dangerous, like snowboarding on concrete: riders on longboards cutting down steep roads at speeds up to 140kph, leaving cars for dust. The risk of mangled limbs becomes clear five minutes into the film when skater Jennifer Schauerte hits a patch of gravel, comes off her board and slams into a road barrier. The X-ray of the snapped bone in her leg is the most horrific thing I’ve seen in a cinema so far this year.
Three operations later, Schauerte is impatient – maybe even reckless – in her determination to get back on her board. She’s planning a trip to the mountains of north Turkey in her camper with four friends from the skating scene. Together they are the WoolfWomen. (Disappointingly, they are not named in honour of Virginia – the extra “o” seems to be a typo that stuck.) It is by no means an essential skateboarding documentary; we don’t learn much about the sport, its history or this group’s place in skateboard culture. Instead, it’s more about chronicling a tribe: cool women travelling wild and free, skinny-dipping in Bulgaria, sitting around the campfire. Schauerte is the star and co-directs with Marchella De Angelis.
There are glimpses of a more interesting film at points. Schauerte is clearly a big personality, with charisma and possibly the ego to match. When it’s time to skate in Turkey, the rest of her pack are not convinced she’s recovered sufficiently. “You don’t care about your body, but we do,” says one, exasperatedly. A sharper, more detached film might have focused more on this. In all honesty, much of Woolf Women feels like watching a fly-on-the-wall of someone’s else’s holiday.
• WoolfWomen: Now or Never is released on 8 June in UK cinemas.
