Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

TIFF promises one third of all movies showing this year will be directed by women. This was virtually unheard of even a few years ago. But I’m finding — especially with indie productions — that there’s been a sea change with loads of good movies being made by women. This week I’m looking at two such movies, one from Canada and another from south of the border. There’s a body hidden beneath the ice in Sudbury and a subculture hidden between the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Never Saw it Coming

Dir: Gail Harvey

Wri: Linwood Barklay

Keisha (Emily Hampshire) is a psychic in Sudbury Ontario. She specializes in locating lost relatives, dead or alive. By touching a personal item she has visions pointing straight to a grave site. But is she authentic? Keisha lives with her young red head son Matt (Keegan Hedley) and her on-again, off again boyfriend Kirk. He moved in with her four months ago but has yet to pay rent.

She’s saving up to buy her son the keyboard he’s always wanted but money is scarce. So she agrees to pull off a onetime scam, involving parents desperate to locate their drug-addicted son.

At the same time she searches out a family with a mother who has gone missing. (The movie opens with her car sinking into a frozen lake as the woman screams for help) The missing woman’s husband Wendel (Eric Roberts) and daughter Melissa  (Katie Boland) have appealed for help on TV, along with police detective Wedmore (Tamara Podemski). Keisha sees this as a chance to locate a missing person and make some quick cash. But her meeting goes terribly wrong, and her chaotic life becomes impossible to handle. Now she has to deal with a suspicious detective, her partner in crime turned junkie blackmailer, and threats from her volatile, layabout boyfriend.

Can her visions – if they actually exist – save Keisha? Or is she heading for the big house?

Never Saw it Coming is a short but credible Canadian mystery thriller, with lots of scurrilous characters without many sympathetic good guys. It seems like almost everyone in Sudbury is a lowlife. Still, I always enjoy a good noirish Canadian movie, despite its flaws. Emily Hampshire and Tamara Podemski as the psychic and cop in a battle of wits, stand out. And Eric Roberts is great as a sketchy schemester.

Skate Kitchen

Dir: Crystal Moselle

Camille (Michelle Vinberg) is an 18 year old vegan who lives with her mom in Long Island. She has long hair, glasses and wears shorts, white socks and thrasher T shirts. She spends most of her time hanging at a nearby skate park practicing her moves, despite the catcalling and abuse she takes from the guys there. But when a mishap sends her to hospital with gushing blood between her legs, her mother forbids her from using a skateboard again. But skating is her life. What can she do?

Find a crew on instagram to skate with. An all female one. She joins them in Manhattan and makes fast friends. They skate the city, exchange stories and defend themselves against asshole guys. There’s strength in numbers. After a big fight with her mom she ends up moving in with Janay (Ardelia Lovelace), one of the girls in the group.

She also gets a day job, as a cashier in a super. There she meets Devon (Jaden Smith) who works in the stock room. He’s a skater too, with dyed red hair, and asks her to let him snap her pics. She does some solid moves on the top of a skyscraper near the empire state building. And sparks seem to fly.

The problem is she likes him, but Devon and Janay used to be a thing. And she never got over their nasty breakup. Can Camille keep her relationship with Devon a secret from her fiercely loyal crew? Or will her life collapse like a house of cards?

Skate Kitchen is a great coming-of-age story set within the world of skateboarding – the music, fights, drugs, sexual experimentation, tampons, comeradery, as well as misogynistic bragadoccio on the male side.

This movie, though, is unique in that it’s painted from a female point of view, a community usually totally absent from anything skate-related. It’s modelled on a real group, also called Skate Kitchen, with many of the actors playing roles based on themselves, including Vinberg, its founder. This gives it a very realistic feel, and provides a genuine look at a seldom seen subculture. This movie’s the real thing and I liked it.

Skate Kitchen and Never Saw it Coming both open today in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.