REVELATION 2011: DRAGONSLAYER

Dragonslayer follows washed-up skater Josh “Screech” Sandoval as the pesky grown-up walls of responsibility begin to close in around him. We first meet him dynamically swooping on his board around the pool of a seemingly abandoned house until an irate occupant appears and kicks him out. This doesn’t faze Sandoval; he’ll just trawl the Fullerton streets by board or Google to find another pool to swoop around in. This without-a-safety-net style defines Sandoval’s approach to life – a friend even dubs him “random chaos”. Wanting to provide a positive role model for his newborn son Sid Rocket, Sandoval reappears on the skating scene after quitting a few years previously (and losing his sponsors in the process). He travels to Sweden for a competition with high hopes, but doesn’t win and returns to the same-old monotony of the local skate park with the other ‘Fresnoids’. To escape the ennui, Sandoval eventually decides to move to Arizona with his girlfriend Leslie on just a pittance - an attempt to avoid a horrifyingly dull ‘ordinary’ life that could also thrust him deeper into it.

Director Tristan Patterson met Sandoval at a party and was impressed enough by his energy and optimism that he decided to make a short about him, which ballooned into this SWSX-winning feature. Despite displaying Sandoval’s less attractive moments (his girlfriend isn’t the only disgusted one when he vomits blindly on the footpath), his approach to life is admirable in its fearlessness even if it edges into stoner stupidity at times. Patterson allows the story reveal itself in a sort-of real time – there is no narration and only a few intriguing clues to Sandoval’s past skating life and childhood – and Sandoval never appears to be fussed by the camera’s presence. Patterson even increases the intimacy by having Sandoval document himself with a smaller flip-camera; this visceral observational flip-cam footage highlights Patterson’s distant, beautifully melancholic 5D footage (those pretty Californian amber waves also won SWSX’s cinematography award).

Dragonslayer recalls the youthful Californian suburban-rot of Gummo or River’s Edge where pointlessness is the point, slowly pushed along by a hopeless sense of foreboding. As the film counts down in titles from ten, the invisible noose tightens around Sandoval while he shuffles his feet, battling silently with the dragon of adult responsibility that follows him everywhere.