Stories about marginalized communities are often shaped by stereotypes, leading to misrepresentation of the challenges real people face. Determined to avoid that, Macedonian director Dina Duma set out to tell the story of Adela, her sister, their mother, and the Romani community while actively involving members of that community in the filmmaking process. The result is a tender coming-of-age drama about three women from the same family, each struggling in her own way against social expectations while trying to protect one another, find their own place in the world, and survive no matter what.
Back in 2022, Skateboarding Is Not for Girls won two CineLink Industry Days awards at the Sarajevo Film Festival, one of them being the Female Voices Award. Looking back now, how important was that early recognition, not just for getting the film made, but also for giving you confidence in the story you wanted to tell?
The Sarajevo Film Festival has been part of this film almost from the very beginning, so returning now with the finished film feels very emotional.
Receiving those awards in 2022 was important to our team, because they came at a very early stage, when the film still existed mostly as an intuition. It was reassuring to feel that other people could already recognize something meaningful in it.
The Female Voices Award was particularly special because the film has always been deeply rooted in the experiences of young girls and in a perspective that we still don’t see often enough on screen. It felt like an encouragement to continue trusting that point of view.
Both Sisterhood, your debut feature, and Skateboarding Is Not for Girls explore the lives of teenage girls navigating complex social pressures. What is it about girlhood that continues to inspire you as a filmmaker, and has your perspective on it changed since your first feature?
I was interested in that particular moment in life when you begin to understand that the world sees you differently than you see yourself. Adolescence is the time when we first become aware of expectations, of gender, of class, of belonging. It’s the moment when society slowly starts telling you who you should become, especially if you are a girl.
I choose to explore that experience through young female characters because it allows me to speak about vulnerability, identity, friendship, power, and freedom from a perspective that still feels underrepresented in cinema.
In “Sisterhood”, I was primarily interested in intimacy, friendship, guilt, and the ways young girls construct themselves under the gaze of others. It was a film about emotional violence and the fragile line between affection and cruelty. With Skateboarding Is Not for Girls, those questions expanded into a broader exploration of freedom, belonging, and the relationship between the body and social control.
The film portrays a Romani community, a group that has often been misunderstood and misrepresented on screen. What responsibilities did you feel in telling this story, and how did you approach balancing a portrayal of real-life challenges with creating characters who exist beyond stereotypes?
I never wanted to make a film about the community, but a film with the community. That was probably one of the biggest responsibilities of making the film. I was very aware that stories about marginalized communities are often approached through a gaze that seeks either exoticism or misery. I wanted to avoid both.
An important part of the process was creating space for dialogue with members of the local Romani community. People from the community read the script, shared their thoughts, and openly discussed elements that felt inaccurate or incomplete. These conversations became an essential part of the creative process, allowing the film to evolve and be reshaped collectively. I never saw the screenplay as something fixed, but as something that could be challenged, enriched, and transformed through exchange and mutual trust.
I also tried to avoid romanticizing suffering. Poverty, discrimination, and forced marriages are realities that affect many girls, but I didn’t want these experiences to become spectacles. I was interested in understanding how larger social structures are embedded in everyday life, and how they are often reproduced through love, care, and a desire to protect rather than through simple notions of good and evil.
Another important aspect was casting mostly non-professional actors from the neighborhood. Their presence, language, humor, and everyday life brought a truthfulness that could never be manufactured. Rather than imposing an external interpretation, I tried to remain attentive and allow the film to be shaped by the people and the environment themselves.
My intention was not to speak about the community from the outside, but to create characters who could exist beyond stereotypes.
While the film is a coming-of-age story centered on Adela, we are also deeply invested in the journey of her sister, as well as their mother. How did you approach creating a story where three women’s experiences and perspectives are intertwined?
Although Adela is at the center of the story, I never saw the film as being only about her. From the beginning, I wanted the three women to feel like different stages of the same journey.
They belong to different generations, but they are all negotiating the same questions, freedom, responsibility, love, and the roles that society has already imagined for them.
The mother has learned to survive within those structures. Zara is beginning to negotiate them. Adela is still at the age where she instinctively pushes against them, before fully understanding what they are. That difference in perspective creates the emotional tension of the film.
It was also important for me not to judge any of them. I wanted to understand each woman from within. Even when they hurt one another or make choices we disagree with, those choices come from love, fear, sacrifice, or circumstances much larger than themselves.
In many ways, the film is also about inheritance. Not only what we inherit materially, but the fears, dreams and expectations that are passed from one generation of women to the next.
Efkjar Abaz, Džefrina Jašari and Simonida Selimovič are truly the heart of this film. How did you work with the three of them when it came to building the characters individually, as well as the family dynamic that is central to the story?
In my process of working, building trust always comes before building characters. We spent a long time together before filming, not only rehearsing, but talking, spending time with one another, and getting to know each other beyond the script.
Since Efkjar, Džefrina, and Simonida all come from different generations and different experiences, it was important that they didn’t simply play a family, but gradually begin to feel like one. We created space where they could build their own relationships, their own rhythms, and their own ways of communicating. Many of those dynamics naturally found their way into the film.
At the same time, each character required a different approach. Adela is still discovering the world, so with Efkjar we tried to preserve a sense of spontaneity and curiosity. With Džefrina, we explored a character who is caught between childhood and adulthood, already carrying responsibilities that no teenager should have. Simonida brought an incredible emotional intelligence to the mother, and it was crucial for the character. We spoke a lot about the quiet weight of motherhood, about sacrifice, dignity, and the loneliness of someone who is constantly trying to hold a family together.
I also encouraged all three of them to bring their own experiences into the process. The film was constantly evolving through them. I wanted to portray a family that feels alive, where love exists alongside conflict, tenderness alongside misunderstanding, and where everyone is simply trying, in their own imperfect way, to hold on to one another.
Skateboarding is more than just a sport in the film. What drew you to skateboarding as a subculture and why do you feel it was a right choice for Adela’s story?
What attracted me to skateboarding was not only the culture around it, but the physical experience it offers. Before it becomes a symbol, it is first something you feel in your body. It requires balance, courage, falling and getting up again, then falling again… just like in life. I found that very cinematic.
But what interested me the most was the relationship between the body and control. The skateboard becomes one of the very few places where Adela has complete agency over her own body. She decides where to go, how fast to move, when she falls down, there is no one around to help her, she gets up on her own. There is something deeply empowering about that.
At the same time, there is a painful contradiction at the heart of the film. As Adela grows older, it becomes increasingly clear that she may not have the same agency over her body in other aspects of her life. Decisions about her future, her role, and eventually even her body begin to shift into the hands of others. That made the skateboard even more meaningful to me, not simply as a symbol of freedom, but as one of the last spaces where she still belongs entirely to herself.
On a symbolic level, the skateboard also follows her emotional journey. At the beginning of the film, it carries a sense of possibility and openness. As her world begins to close in around her, that relationship changes as well. I was interested in allowing the skateboard to become almost an emotional extension of her inner life.
I think movement is deeply connected to freedom. The moment your body can move without fear, you begin to imagine that your life might be able to move too.
The skateboarding scenes stand out thanks to the unique editing, camera movement, and rhythm, almost creating a different cinematic world within the film. How did you decide on that visual language for those sequences?
From the very beginning, I knew that the skateboarding sequences couldn’t be filmed in the same way as the rest of the film, because they represent a completely different emotional state for Adela.
Throughout most of the film, the camera patiently observes the characters. It stays close to them, allowing us to experience their everyday reality without forcing emotion. But when Adela gets on the skateboard, something shifts. Her relationship with the world changes, and I wanted the cinematic language to change with her.
We worked very closely on the rhythm between the camera, editing, and movement. The camera becomes more fluid, the editing more dynamic, almost breathing together with her body. It was important that the audience doesn’t simply watch her skateboard, but experiences what it feels like to be inside that moment.
Beyond the story itself, what do you hope the audience takes away from your film?
More than anything, I hope the film creates a space for empathy.
We live in a time where we consume other people’s lives very quickly. Images of poverty, violence, inequality, and exclusions have become part of our everyday reality, and sometimes I fear we are slowly becoming desensitized to them.
Cinema has the ability to resist that. It asks us to slow down, to stay with someone, to look a little longer, to listen a little more carefully. For me, that is already a political act.
I don’t expect the audience to leave the cinema with answers or solutions. But I do hope they leave carrying the characters with them for a little while. If, after the film, someone looks at another person with a little more curiosity, tenderness, or understanding, then I feel the film has already done something meaningful.
