IN DEVELOPMENT

ABOUT THE ART OF NOT KNOWING

It’s January 2019, and Jonathan is getting ready to pick up someone from prison for the first time in his life. How did he end up here? A naive documentary director, he is trying to explain his feelings towards a man he has many conflicted thoughts about – his old mentor Anders, who is getting out after serving a 4-year sentence for subjecting young boys on his skateboarding team to torturous exercises and psychological abuse.

Out of prison, Anders tries to figure out where all his things are, picking up bits and pieces from his past in the hopes of restoring a life he once had. He’s paranoid about people who might seek redemption in a non-verbal way. At the same time, he is optimistic about finding a way to ask for forgiveness from the victims or, more specifically, Jean-Marc.

Jean-Marc, who used to be one of the top skaters in Europe as a youngster, was Anders' first victim and friend for over 25 years. Jean-Marc never gave much thought to the exercises he had to do as a 13-year-old kid, not because it didn’t matter, but because he just couldn’t remember them. They were blocked inside his mind until one day, 20 years later, he got a call from the police, wondering if he could help with some details regarding Anders’ case.

Jean-Marc is trying to create a new chapter in life, since he lost his job as a skateboarder after the whole media frenzy about the case - being portrayed as a victim and maintaining a career as a famous skater is a hard role to balance. Together, Jean-Marc and Jonathan dig down into the past to try to understand how an abusive system could survive inside their tight-knit community for over twenty years, without no one saying anything to the other.

Jonathan starts digging in his video archive for clues while Anders ends up in a gateway station between earth and hell, his life standing still without any progress. He starts to realise that staying in Sweden, where one has a one-click possibility to find out what he has done, will be difficult. Instead of claiming his innocence and blaming the Swedish justice system, Anders looks into himself and starts an internal journey, but will he fully understand what his own inhuman deeds have done to the victims?

Reality sometimes overcomes our wildest imaginations, and this story is not an exception. The fact that it takes place in the skateboarding universe, with young men as victims, broadens the perspective of how gatekeepers still to this day abuse their power over young athletes and artists. At the same time, it explores the aftermath of a crime in real-time, with a unique closeness to the survivors and perpetrator due to the director’s own role as a skateboard filmmaker in the team.

PRODUCTION INFO

Title: The Art Of Not Knowing

Genre: Documentary

Length: 90 min

CREDITS

Director: Jonathan Lomar

Producer: Hanna Markkanen (WG Film)