Los Angeles based director Tristan Patterson just debuted his documentary Dragonslayer. It’s a true life documentary centered in Fullerton, California, following 23-year-old drifter and sometimes homeless former skate star Josh “Skreech” Sandoval as he spends his days seeking out abandoned swimming pools, travelling to competitions in Oregon and Sweden, and attempting to get to know his infant son.
It’s a cinema vérité movie, taking the viewer through a golden South California haze of lost youth, broken homes and abandoned swimming pools, set to a soundtrack of indie-rock bands on small labels.

The director stated, about it: “I met Skreech at a party in an abandoned airfield off the I-10 in Chino, California right after our country’s economic collapse. He had a lime-green Mohawk and was wearing a matching Screamers t-shirt in honor of the L.A. punk band that never recorded an album. He looked malnourished and lost, and claimed he was on 5 tabs of acid. It was impossible to talk to him; his head was lost in the clouds. Then I saw him skate. I think Skreech is like a lot of kids from his generation — smart enough to know a potentially bleak future looms and scrambling to figure out a way to survive in it. He’s also on a wavelength all his own. Dragonslayer is my attempt to capture this wavelength and preserve it“.