Tribeca 2026 Review: SKATEBOARDING IS NOT FOR GIRLS, Bittersweet Tale of Girlhood Realities

In Skopje, Northern Macedonia, a teenager, Zara (Džefrina Jašari), and her younger sister, Adela (Efkjar Abaz), live age-appropriate lives, going to school and getting into moderate trouble.

For a while, it seems like the social reality around them doesn’t really touch them in a significant way. But the struggle and the friction already exist even before the girls’ mother, Esma (Simonida Selimovic), finds out that her ever-absent husband isn’t coming back from Switzerland, having found new love.

Despite Esma’s desperate hustle and efforts to find a new job, the bills just keep piling up. Then, Esma’s sister-in-law offers a solution: Take Zara to a Bridal Market in Bulgaria and marry her into a wealthy family for a fee.

Skateboarding Is Not for Girls is the second feature of Macedonian director Dina Duma, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, where it received the Nora Ephron Award. The jury's decision seems entirely relatable, since the film not only represents the female perspective that the award traditionally champions, but also surprisingly manages to follow the spirit of the late director’s work, at least in terms of subverting genre clichés by clashing them with a much harsher reality.

The trope that at first seems to be at play here is the concept of a magical saving. As soon as the new reality sinks in, both Esma and Zara quickly come to terms with the idea of the latter’s “marriage”, as it seems to be the only way of supporting the family.

But that’s not the case with Adela, who, through her young, maximalist worldview, sees the intended course of action for what it really is: a barbaric practice that, at its core, comes down to selling women for a price. Adela’s naïve but impressive determination tells her she can still do something to prevent it: make a pact with her older sister, pray to God, earn the needed money by securing a job or by participating in a skateboarding contest.

The reality, however, just keeps winning at every turn of the story. For all the unpleasantness that seems to be in store for Zara, Skateboarding Is Not for Girls doesn’t play it out in a dramatic way. Instead, the film opts for depicting something tragic as routinely as possible, which in turn just makes it hit even harder. The combination of a free, cinema verité-like camera, loose, fragmented narrative, and the cast consisting mainly of non-professional performers gives the film a feel of something painfully authentic and relatable, even outside the given national and geographical reality.

All the while, the same creative choices lend the film a hint of magical realism. Of a dark fable, depicting reality stuck between the accomplishments of the modern world and the archaic principles, still based on the inherent imbalance of power, creating a reality where many women still have more responsibilities than rights.

The magical realism also shines through the motive that also fascinated Dina Duma in her feature debut, aptly named Sisterhood: it's the clash that exists between adulthood and the idealistic bubble of childhood, making the people who have already experienced hardship in their lives wish to stick to that bubble as long as possible. 

The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Visit the film's page at the festival's official site for more information.