THIS IS BRIGHTON is a coming-of-age sports documentary about Brighton Zeuner, one of the best female contest skateboarders of her generation. As skateboarding becomes an Olympic sport, this character-driven film reveals the anxiety and pressures of competition, effects of social media, and how a global pandemic upended the promise of a young skater destined to be the best.
SYNOPSIS
THIS IS BRIGHTON will take you on a teenage journey into the unique world of competitive skateboarding, with more girls than ever taking it by storm. The documentary follows Brighton, one of the best female contest skateboarders of her generation, becoming the youngest X Games Gold Medalist in history on her 13th birthday in 2017- only to repeat the effort again the following year. Skateboarding has been historically a youth-based lifestyle, so it’s no wonder that the best contest skaters today are often in their early teens.
The film follows Brighton through the growing pains of puberty and how these bodily changes affect her skating; her equally exciting and exhausting travels around the world; the pressures she overcomes to make the podium, the sponsorship obligations and anxiety that bubbles as she matures. The film reveals that jet-setting across the globe and competing at the highest level comes with a price. Character-driven and full of intimate verité scenes of this young talent, we will watch Brighton’s success and mental struggles as she grows up right before our eyes after nearly four years of filming.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Beth Aala
Beth Aala is an award-winning Filipina-American documentary filmmaker who has her hand in all aspects of production. In addition to directing and producing, she shoots and edits. She has won three Emmy awards and a Peabody Award for her documentary work at HBO. Beth recently directed and produced the feature documentary, Made in Boise. The film premiered at AFI Docs in June 2019 and was the season opener for PBS's 2019-2020 award-winning Independent Lens series. It was honored as a 2020 News and Documentary nominee.
Other film credits include Rancher Farmer, Fisherman which she co-directed and produced and premiered at Sundance in 2017, and Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon (A&E IndieFilms) which she directed and produced with comedian Mike Myers and Academy award-winning producer Caroline Waterlow. Supermensch is an intimate and entertaining portrait of talent manager, Shep Gordon, the most famous man you’ve never heard of. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 and was nominated for the 2015 News and Documentary Emmy Awards and won the 2014 Hollywood Film Award for Best Documentary.
Beth has been supported by the International Documentary Association, Chicken & Egg, and ITVS and is an honored recipient of the NYSCA Artist Grant, a proud member of ADOC, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Filipinx Filmmakers, and is a Wyncote Fellow. Her work has been featured on HBO, PBS, A&E, Discovery, and MTV.
Producer Caroline Waterlow
Caroline Waterlow is an award-winning documentary film producer based in New York City. Waterlow produced O.J.: Made in America, an ESPN Films documentary directed by Ezra Edelman and winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 89t Academy Awards. Most recently, she produced QUALIFIED, an ESPN Films 30 for 30 documentary about race car driver Janet Guthrie, the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500.
Feature documentaries include Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by Beth Aala and Mike Myers which premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival; and the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. In 2013 she was senior producer of content for MAKERS.com and from 2006-2012 & she contributed to multiple award-winning HBO documentaries including Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush and TEDDY: In His Own Words.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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