The first time we see 17-year-old Chicagoan Leo Castillo, he’s in the hospital, receiving treatment for an injury of some sort, and he’s asked the question: Tell me what happened. Tell me a story.
Cut to a montage of Leo and his friends skateboarding in and around the Little Village neighborhood — sometimes as seen from a camera mounted beneath a skateboard. Cruising past a graffiti-spangled wall and a shop with gowns in the window, down tree-lined streets, near a birria restaurant, in the parking lot of a bank, as Leo tells us, “Skateboarding came into my life through my older brother. He had bought me a skateboard for my … seventh birthday. And he was basically trying to put me on the RIGHT path, by telling me that gangs are bad. Because [everyone in my family was] in gangs.”
