double bill #5

In All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and I Am Good at Karate, adolescence drifts between boredom and adulthood. Enzo Smits’s skateboarders circle the empty streets of a Flemish suburb, waiting for life to begin, while Jesse Dadds’s lone fighter wanders a Kent estate, wrestling demons both imagined and real. Each film captures that restless need to escape one’s own stillness.

Yet, in watching them, we feel a form of nostalgia, this very time when every uncertainty was also a form of freedom. The weight of the world had not yet settled, and even the smallest gesture—a turn, a punch, a push of the board—nods at self-governance. Both films remind us that youth is also about inhabiting the moment—drifting, waiting, and daring to dream of what might come next.