
Cannonball: Skating the Swimming Pool
California's drought years left behind a strange landscape: thousands of backyard pools drained dry, some choked with black water, others turned into dumping grounds for old furniture and dead rodents. This short documentary follows skateboarders who turned those abandoned basins into a private circuit, tracing the jelly-bean-shaped pools back to the companies that poured them, Sunny Side and Champagne among them. Riders talk about scouting empty houses, sneaking past fences, and reading a pool's curves the way a surfer reads a wave, while the film lingers on the concrete itself, cracked, algae-stained, littered with the debris of families who moved on. It is less a highlight reel than a study of adaptation, showing how a suburban failure, the empty pool as symbol of foreclosure and drought, became raw material for a specific kind of skating culture. The interviews carry the film, unhurried and specific about technique, trespassing, and the pools that got away.