Betty Will Make You Want To Shred

I first found out about the Skate Kitchen collective in 2018 from a series of events at the House of Vans encouraging women to pick up skateboarding. The women of the Skate Kitchen exude a near-impossible balance of extreme confidence and radical encouragement—just watching them in their element will make you want to pick up a board and give it a try

Betty’s strongest assets are its characters. Every member of the eclectic crew is fully developed in a way that could not have happened in the 90-minute film, and not one member feels more important than another. Because of the range of young women, Betty is able to examine the inner dilemmas of women of various experiences: not just dealing with sexism, but how it intersects with racism, homophobia, and class status. But it’s not a show that incessantly harks on the gender politics of skateboarding in a faux “girl boss” way. Rather, it honestly depicts the ways young women have been trained to deal with these things for their entire lives.