Film Courage: Your movie has so many themes – fatherhood and family, breaking out of or staying in a small town, etc. What do you want people to gain from MINDING THE GAP?
Bing Liu, filmmaker of MINDING THE GAP: Life moves really fast. We go into our 20’s and we get a job, a career, family (maybe). Then we turn 30 and all of the sudden we get old. But then we’ve often experienced adolescence as a time where our emotions are not taken seriously.They are brushed off as like just grow up or oh, you’re being so emotional. And there are all these epithets that sort of unconsciously tell us like oh no, we need to grow up, we need to grow up.
But in fact that time of adolescence it’s such a soft time, such a malleable time and it just informs who we become so much.
Even in the little things like getting our first job or taking about our father for the first time with a trusted friend, that stuff really matters. And I think we should give it the respect and the analysis that it deserves. I think it will help us understand ourselves as adults.
Also, we were talking about this off camera but there are millions of Zack and Kiere’s out there and not all of them happen to skateboard. These are issues that youth face across the board…(Stay tuned for the full video interview with Bing Liu coming soon!)
Kartemquin Films presents MINDING THE GAP on Hulu.
Three young men bond across racial lines to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. Ten years later, while facing adult responsibilities, unsettling revelations force them to reckon with their fathers, their mothers, and each other.
ABOUT MINDING THE GAP: