What does it mean to come of age in the mod­ern world?

“It takes a very long time to become young,” said Pablo Picas­so, quot­ed in Jean Cocteau’s book ​‘The Hand of a Stranger’ – but the reverse can be true too, as dis­played in three first-time fea­tures about young peo­ple which screened recent­ly at CPH:DOX. For these folks the bur­den of adult­hood arrives all too quick­ly, as they are forced to reck­on with prob­lem­at­ic fam­i­lies, iden­ti­ty issues, tough respon­si­bil­i­ties and the oth­er grim real­i­ties that adult life brings.

“Your whole life, soci­ety tells you to be a man,” laments Zach, one of the three trou­bled young pro­tag­o­nist skaters in Bing Liu’s remark­able Mind­ing the Gap. ​“Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing,” he argues, but his path seems to have gone par­tic­u­lar­ly astray. ​“We have to grow up, and it’s gonna fuckin’ suck.”

All three boys come from volatile homes. Zach, a part-time father and unsta­ble part­ner, has trou­ble con­nect­ing his cur­rent behav­iour with the con­tours of his past. Con­verse­ly, Bing – who fea­tures both in front of and behind cam­era – is unable to stop mak­ing these con­nec­tions in his own life, fear­ful that the abuse he received from his father might become paralysing, or worse, self-per­pet­u­at­ing. The third char­ac­ter, Keire, who sim­i­lar­ly fell vic­tim to an over­ly stern father, sits some­where in between. Increas­ing­ly aware of the wrong­do­ing he received, he is blind to its ramifications.

As they skate and grow togeth­er, Liu records con­stant­ly. Rolling in flu­id­ly filmed skate-tapes from their ear­ly years togeth­er with obser­va­tion­al mate­r­i­al made lat­er, he cre­ates a rhyth­mic, flow­ing chron­i­cle of their shared lives, and also of the town they live in. Inter­spersed audio elu­ci­dates what it means to grow up in the rust belt of Rock­ford, Illi­nois, a place with few employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, mass pop­u­la­tion exo­dus, and a dis­tinct prob­lem with vio­lence, most­ly (and per­ti­nent­ly) domestic.

Skate­board­ing acts as not just the glue that keeps them togeth­er but that which fix­es them too. When Keire states that it’s not a hob­by but a ​“life or death thing”, he touch­es on some­thing. ​“It’s weird, it’s just real­ly dif­fi­cult for me to explain right now”, he says, wear­ing a crooked smile. Much that they are able to say comes fun­nelled through all sorts of fil­ters; Zach even calls film­mak­ing ​“free-ther­a­py”. Mas­culin­i­ty pres­suris­es and inter­nalis­es. Bing brings it out, using the form of his film as a release.

Anoth­er film fea­tur­ing a young male trio is Chase White­side and Erick Stoll’s Améri­ca, a title refer­ring not to the nation but to a per­son. Améri­ca is the broth­ers’ 93-year-old grand­moth­er, a frail, fatigued but nev­er­the­less resilient woman who has fall­en under their col­lec­tive charge. To state that they rise to the occa­sion seems an under­state­ment; rare is it to see such com­mit­ment to care.

Besides inter­mit­tent – slight­ly too lit­er­al – nar­ra­tion, the film is entire­ly obser­va­tion­al, record­ing in a rov­ing cam­era that shows much com­po­si­tion­al con­sid­er­a­tion and seems to cap­ture every­thing, with­out being inva­sive. The film­mak­ers move in and out of prox­im­i­ty as the sit­u­a­tion requires, and the trust of the par­tic­i­pants comes across in the material.

As the broth­ers bathe Améri­ca, change her, feed, walk and enter­tain her, it is nev­er quite clear how cog­nisant she is. In between in-depth debates over her diges­tive cycles and her men­tal acu­ity (care is logis­ti­cal and bureau­crat­ic too, after all), they squab­ble over their rel­a­tive con­tri­bu­tions and about what she might want or think. Raised puls­es turn to thrown fists and much more besides, and the mount­ing pres­sures of the increas­ing­ly her­culean shared task they’ve tak­en on threat­ens a fracture.

Ear­ly on, Améri­ca asks why the film­mak­ers are record­ing her. ​“Because you’re a star,” answers Diego, the youngest and most atten­tive broth­er, instinc­tive­ly and with a huge grin. And while in many ways she is, nei­ther she nor the broth­ers are ulti­mate­ly the film’s prime sub­ject. An hon­est, inti­mate trea­tise on kind­ness, Améri­ca is a film about what it means to have the best years of your life inter­rupt­ed by the duty of care, and what’s more, to want that to happen.

The young pro­tag­o­nists come off less favourably in Nico­las Peduzzi’s South­ern Belle, a squalid, sor­did pro­file of Taelor, the daugh­ter of a deceased Tex­an mul­ti-mil­lion­aire, and the band of uncouth char­ac­ters she sur­rounds her­self with. Under the pun­ish­ing, prob­ing gaze of the French direc­tor – a marked out­sider to the South­ern-Amer­i­can milieu observed – no one comes off well, nor do they seem to have any desire to.

Bran­dish­ing an armoury of drink, drugs and assault rifles, Taelor and her boyfriend cruise the city at nights self-destruc­tive­ly, spout­ing self-involved dia­tribes and racist tirades to cam­era whilst intox­i­cat­ing them­selves into obliv­ion. Sev­er­al sequences stand out. In one, Taelor pirou­ettes in a Wal­mart carpark, the cam­era piv­ot­ing around her as she dances the night away. In anoth­er, her uncle – a cocaine-addled car­i­ca­ture so absurd no satirist could write him – berates her for the lies she tells her­self about her life and past, entire­ly unaware of his own contradictions.

It is a tough watch, cer­tain­ly, but behind the nihilism hope­ful­ly lies some­thing more des­per­ate­ly human. ​“Maybe it’s pompous and self-con­ceit­ed, but I believe it,” Taelor says at the end of anoth­er inco­her­ent vod­ka-mono­logue, unwit­ting­ly sum­maris­ing the film’s the­sis in a sin­gle sen­tence. We are shaped by the sto­ries we tell our­selves; become too enveloped in your own fic­tions and you might find your­self not just lost to the world, but a stranger to even yourself.

Along­side an effec­tive synth score, Peduzzi inter­jects pen­sive spo­ken nar­ra­tion from Tael­er, sto­ry­telling that is asyn­chro­nous to the on-screen action but comes to inform per­cep­tion of it. As she describes her past, her rela­tion­ship with her father, and how his pass­ing when she was 14 ​“com­pro­mised [her] life for the decade to fol­low”, she seems sym­pa­thet­ic – sen­si­tive and vul­ner­a­ble in a way she that won’t let her­self be when observed. Can the expe­ri­ence of grief shat­ter some­one entire­ly, if it falls at such a cru­cial junc­ture in their life? It takes a very long time to become young, but you sure can grow old fast.

For more on this year’s CPH:DOX fes­ti­val vis­it cph​dox​.dk