Vladimir Film Festival

Brett Nich­ols: Path­ways 2 & Broadway

Brijuni / Tito's cinema / 25 / 9 / 2022 / Film

Brett Nich­ols is the epi­tome of the skate­board­ing under­dog, with a vicari­ous pas­sion for each and every aspect of the activ­ity ran­ging from its tech­nic­al prac­tice (Brett him­self hav­ing quite the his­tory of some great skat­ing under his belt) to every pos­sible social and cul­tur­al exten­sion of it; that’s includ­ing its rela­tion­ship with the skated ter­rain, under the form of a cer­tain fas­cin­a­tion with archi­tec­ture; its vari­ety in form, res­ult­ing in the vast know­ledge of even the most niche scenes world­wide and video ini­ti­at­ives such as Állatkert (not to men­tion a rather ded­ic­ated inde­pend­ent DVD col­lec­tion); and its doc­u­ment­a­tion, com­plete with a great filmmaker’s eye to boot. Brett’s gen­er­al curi­os­ity for a world that may be intim­id­at­ing to nav­ig­ate if it weren’t for the reas­sur­ing lens of skate­board­ing to try and bet­ter tame it espe­cially shone in Path­ways (2016), a skate video mas­ter­piece relay­ing the best tend­en­cies in inde­pend­ent skate film­mak­ing world­wide only for the author to spin those influ­ences around his own way and into some­thing fresh, unique and par­tic­u­larly (but not just) archi­tec­ture-focused, with import­ant atten­tion to detail every­where. To this day, we’re talk­ing a must watch that is only rel­at­ively niche, very pos­sibly, due to the dif­fi­cult shape and form of skate media broad­cast­ing alto­geth­er at the time, but is worth (re-)searching. Now, this year at Vladi­mir will be presen­ted in per­son not just one, but the two new full-length films Brett has been cook­ing up ever since: Path­ways 2, six years in the mak­ing and Broad­way, sev­en and espe­cially centered around the older archi­tec­ture of the Bay Area, without step­ping foot in San Fran­cisco, primar­ily filmed in Oak­land and the great­er East Bay.