Laser lights, thumping bass and blades cut across ice inside Vegapolis, France’s most popular skating rink, where teens gather each week. What begins as a vibrant portrait of this hangout on the outskirts of Montpellier gradually reveals something more meaningful: a space where friendships are forged, crushes are dissected and dreams about the future take shape. Micha Barban Dangerfield’s kaleidoscopic coming-of-age film centres on the girls who inhabit the rink, moving between the intensity of skating practice and the candid conversations that unfold at the edges of the ice—about school, love and the thrill and confusion of growing up. There’s an infectious energy to these moments, full of colour, humour and the immediacy of adolescence, but a quieter undercurrent runs alongside them: everyone is aware that this chapter won’t last forever. Returning to a place she knows from her own teenage years, Dangerfield captures with familiar tenderness a fleeting space where both the freedom and fragility of youth exist, if briefly, in perfect balance. Carmen Thompson
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