10 Best Documentary Movies Of The Last Decade

What started as breakout director Bing Liu filming his friends having fun skateboarding soon transforms into a real-life coming-of-age tale in Oscar-nominated documentary Minding The Gap.

Beginning with light-hearted sequences of Liu and his two friends Keire and Zack having the time of their lives skateboarding, this film portrays the friends’ bond over boarding as the purest form of escapism in which they can grind all their troubles away. However, it’s only as the boys approach adulthood and begin to forge their own paths that they start to understand what it was they were trying to escape from.

As the three friends grow older, they begin to reflect upon the abuse and violence they suffered when they were younger and how those experiences have subsequently begun to shape the men they’re becoming. Keire struggles with the loss of his father who he had a complicated relationship with, meanwhile Zack starts to fall into the same spiral of abuse and alcoholism that he grew up with.

Liu weaves these stories along with his own together to create a powerful example of how race, class, and experiences can influence the kind of people that we become in this deeply personal story of discovery.