Crystal Moselle finds a group of people nobody has filmed, watches them until they forget she is there, and builds the film around what they do anyway. It makes for lovely afternoons on screen and, so far, for not much plot.
Fi1m perspective
A skateboard drops off a kerb into traffic and the camera goes with it, low at hip height, for a block without a cut. That is the Crystal Moselle shot, and everything else in her work is arranged to leave room for it. The people on the boards are not actors. They are the people she found doing the thing, and she has filmed them doing it more or less as they would have done it without her.
She started with a documentary. The Wolfpack (2015) followed a family of brothers who had grown up barely leaving their flat, and it set the pattern: a chance encounter, a subculture, a director content to watch. Skate Kitchen (2018) was the same method with a script, built around a group of young women she had met skateboarding in New York. Betty (2020) gave those skaters two seasons of six half-hours and is the longest she has stayed with one group. Since then there have been My Robot Sophia (2022) and The Black Sea (2024), the latter co-directed with Derrick B. Harden.
What works is the watching. In Betty, Rachelle Vinberg, Nina Moran, Dede Lovelace, Kabrina Adams and Ajani Russell talk over one another the way friends do and not the way scripts do, and Aska Matsumiya's score comes up under the skating like a radio left on in the next room. The best minute of the first episode is five girls moving through Manhattan together while the light goes, and for that minute we felt seventeen and unsupervised, which is not a feeling television often manages. Moselle has put it this way herself: "I had this realization that I had an eye for taking reality and manipulating it into something new." That is the plainest description of the job she does.
What does not work is anything that needs a shape. The moment an episode of Betty is handed a party, a lost bag or a boy to argue about, the joins show, and scenes stop because the half-hour is up rather than because anything has finished. Twelve writers are credited on the series, Lesley Arfin among them, and the seams are where they meet. The notices have been kind, and the kindest of them still say the work is more atmosphere than story. We would not argue. Skate Kitchen had ninety minutes and a mother to push against; the series has afternoons, and afternoons do not end so much as get dark.
That is a limit, and it may also be the point. Moselle came to scripts from documentary and she still trusts the camera more than the page. Start with Betty if you want to see the method at its most relaxed, and Skate Kitchen if you want it to go somewhere. We will be curious to see whether The Black Sea, made with a co-director beside her, gives her a plot she is willing to keep.
Biography
Crystal Moselle is an American filmmaker and director. Born Sierra Ditson Moselle in San Francisco in 1980, she studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Her debut documentary The Wolfpack (2015) premiered at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. She directed the short film That One Day (2016) and the feature Skate Kitchen (2018). In 2020 she created, wrote and directed the HBO series Betty, which was based on Skate Kitchen and ran for two seasons.
