Vladimir Film Festival

Zach Cham­ber­lin and Richard Hart interview

30 / 9 / 2017 / Interview

Photo Ed Wirgman

Inter­view by Aymer­ic Nocus

We are honored that Zach Cham­ber­lin has chosen Vladi­mir Film Fest­iv­al for a world premiere of his pro­ject “Push Peri­od­ic­al World Tour II” which he co-cre­ated with Richard Hart. As we are left speech­less, Aymer­ic Nocus has pre­pared a short inter­view with Zach and Richard for the festival’s newspaper.

Q: Can you briefly describe the idea behind those Push Par­tial World Tours?

Z.C. I’m curi­ous to see how split­ting Richard and I up and inter­rog­at­ing will end up. Some­thing along the lines of Richard and I being able to travel well togeth­er with groups of dudes, have fun, film some sprinkly clips and shoot pho­tos for Push.

R.H. The idea of the Par­tial World Tour is com­pletely unreal­ist­ic from a fin­an­cial point of view but com­pletely suc­cess­ful from a cre­at­ive one. It would make way more sense to just do a gen­er­ic “com­pany” trip and have it all paid for and organ­ized. How­ever, I wanted to do away with any of that, and pick a crew of skaters that I am a fan of, want to sup­port (and want to hang out with); who don’t neces­sar­ily have any spon­sors in com­mon. As for the loc­a­tions, it seems to work well to have two con­trast­ing places that look and feel different.

Photo Ed Wirgman

Q: A magazine organ­iz­ing (and to an extent fund­ing) skate trips as opposed to just cov­er­ing them is not a com­mon occur­rence in skat­ing. How did the idea first come up? Did you plan on really break­ing cer­tain stand­ards be it in terms of organ­iz­a­tion and presentation?

Z.C. Meet­ing the scene in the cit­ies we float to and get­ting to know the loc­al crews is the main reas­on for the Par­tial World Tours. Skat­ing cutty spots, rough shit, smooth plazas, beer ally’s, hash reports and street watch­ing are a few of the oth­er reas­ons. Por­tray­ing some nar­rat­ive of city lives and the beau­ti­ful every­day life of some­where new keeps it inter­est­ing for me. Mix­ing with Richard’s pho­tos works great for this.

Q: The skate­boarders involved in them are often bound to dif­fer­ent brands in terms of spon­sor­ship, do you think such an approach allows for a more organ­ic take on the idea of a “skate trip”, where the skat­ing really is what comes first, also maybe impact­ing the look and feel of the end results?

Z.C. Yeah you’re right. It’s totally open. There’s no gim­mick or false vibe shit. I loved piss drunx as a kid for sure but we don’t have to live up to any­thing for the trip except try and have skate­board­ing in there. The last Par­tial World Twour (2) some hom­ies had nev­er met before. It worked out rad like you say mostly because the bot­tom line of skat­ing breaks all barriers.

Q: The video being screened at vff 2017 doc­u­ments the second ever Par­tial World Twour (hence Twour), the pre­vi­ous one took place the year before, how did the idea for that one come up? Are you plan­ning on mak­ing it a yearly installment?

Z.C. I told Richard recently: “Once you start say­ing no to things they might stop com­ing around”. So whenev­er a pos­sib­il­ity comes by to travel I try to grab it.

R.H. The first pwt was to Bris­tol and Bud­apest. That trip went really well and I wanted to do anoth­er one this year with a dif­fer­ent crew and dif­fer­ent cit­ies. The only con­stant was filmer Zach Cham­ber­lin who is one of my best friends and always up for an adven­ture. Obvi­ously he’s one of the best filmers out there, and always stoked to film. Since these aren’t “com­pany” trips, there’s no pres­sure for any­one, which keeps the vibes good.

Q: Who were the skaters involved on this one and where did you go?

Z.C. Lis­boa Por­tugal and Ant­wer­pen Bel­gi­um, Richard’s new home base, with Ryan Bar­low, Roger Krebs, Bobby Wor­rest, John Barag­wanath & Kev­in Coakley.

R.H. We roun­ded up a rad crew to skate Ant­werp and Lis­bon. John Barag­wanath is one of my favour­ite new skaters. We met on a The­or­ies trip to Chica­go (pp6), and he was the first per­son I asked to come. Kev­in Coakley always finds unusu­al tricks to do at unusu­al spots. Bobby Wor­rest is one of the best ledge skaters out there. It’s amaz­ing to watch him. Also a fun guy to have a beer with, or three. Roger Krebs joined us in Lis­bon and was 100% full energy and power. Ryan Bar­low is anoth­er of my favour­ite new­er guys. Best style and crazy pop. For Ryan, John and Roger, this was their first trip to Europe, so it was rad to watch them get excited about explor­ing the world.

Skate­board­ing gives you such an amaz­ing oppor­tun­ity to do that. And I sup­pose that is the under­ly­ing idea with this whole pro­ject. Hope­fully it will inspire people to do the same.

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The screen­ing of Push Par­tial World Tour 2 was held on Septem­ber 23rd at the Cva­jn­er gal­lery in Pula.