Opening this Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a two-week run, Minding the Gap is one of the strongest American documentaries to play Chicago this year. Director Bing Liu begins with a seemingly limited subject—skateboarders in their late teens and early 20s in Rockford, Illinois—and pursues it with such diligence and curiosity that the film ends up addressing a number of major issues. Minding the Gap is at once an elegy for urban, blue-collar America and a sobering meditation on domestic violence. Liu’s principal subjects, a black teenage boy named Keire Johnson and a white man in his early 20s named Zack Mulligan, were both abused as children; so too was the director himself. Following Johnson and Mulligan as they enter adulthood while reflecting on his own family history, Liu explores the lasting effects of domestic violence and the ways that young men in particular cope with them. I recently spoke with the 29-year-old Liu about Minding the Gap, his evolution as a filmmaker, and what he learned about his hometown of Rockford by making a movie about it.
What is valued in the skate-video genre is originality and authenticity. Coming from an authentic place and trying new things is important, even if they don’t work. You know, there’s very little reward in it—it’s not like you’re going to be making money off skate videos. But you’ll still take two to three years to make a 25-minute skate video and have it premiere. So it sort of mimics independent filmmaking in a way. There’s also a lot of learning on your own and being OK with making mistakes and trying things.
And there were other skate videographers who were using Sufjan Stevens and Bright Eyes in their skate videos. I thought, “This really gets at something else. It’s so feminine and ethereal.” In my adolescence I spent a lot of time having 3 AM phone conversations about being depressed, skirting around what was going on at home. And at parties, I’d be the one getting people to talk about their childhoods while other people were doing beer bongs in the living room. When I started doing this project, I went around the country and interviewed all these skateboarders. I was seeking this emotional vulnerability that I knew was there, but I felt we weren’t talking about enough.
I mean, my first job was as a dishwasher. I was 14. I was still doing it when I moved out of Rockford at 19.
Has your view of Rockford changed as a result of making the film?
Being in the film wasn’t difficult. Handling the information that Nina gave me was far more difficult than interviewing my mom. That was simply an issue of picking a date to do the interview and hiring a crew.
