The 900 is a skateboarding trick that involves two and a half rotations above a vert ramp. For years, it was a move attempted in private and spoken of as folklore. It entered the annals in June 1999, when Tony Hawk landed it at the X Games in San Francisco, after his allotted time had run out. The impossible was achieved under stadium lights, in a corporate sporting format conceived for television. So, Narducci’s Nine Hundred stages a counter-scene. Six months after the 900 became televised fact, Mara attempts it while the collective gaze is pointed elsewhere.

That difference is surely gendered: Vert skating's canon was overwhelmingly male, from the Zephyr team of 1970s Dogtown, where Peggy Oki was the lone woman, to a televised sport whose female practitioners stood mostly at the edge of the broadcast. Narducci’s film refuses to stage Mara's entry as public vindication. There is no crowd to silence and no panel of judges to win round: the politics of access are enacted, not argued. The film's visual scheme sets still, enclosed interiors against an empty city charged with motion. It would be easy to read this as an allegory of analogue and digital, but the interior Mara leaves is particular: the family dinner, the domestic sphere to which femininity has historically been assigned, gathered around a screen commanding what it ought to fear. So her exit is a secession from that order. Narducci's Rome, vacated by the collective retreat indoors, becomes available pointedly to a girl, acting independently at night, whose presence in public after dark is usually framed as risk rather than freedom.

Narducci, born in Naples in 1997, studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia from 2021 to 2024; her short Bagarre (2025) won the Film Impresa Award at Alice nella Città and was shortlisted for this year's David di Donatello Awards. On where a film begins, she is unequivocal. “I usually start with an image,” she says. “I have to admit that used to drive the screenwriters I worked with completely crazy, but we've all grown up since then and we're still on great terms.” That image is typically one of transition. “I like telling stories about rites of passage and transitional phases,” she says, “personal growth and everything a single, precise moment carries with it.” Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909) described initiation in three stages: separation from the established order, a liminal passage in which ordinary rules are suspended, and reincorporation in a changed state. Nine Hundred is almost diagrammatically liminal. Mara leaves the family table, passes through a city emptied of its usual order and reaches a threshold at once personal, athletic and historical. Undertaken among peers rather than sanctioned by elders, it is an initiation she authors for herself.

Nor does the film end with a victory lap. What coincides with midnight is the attempt, not the verdict. Hawk's clock was extended so that spectacle could have its climax; Mara's is absolute and indifferent. The world does not end. It begins again. That anticlimax suits Narducci's temperament. “I love comedy, especially bittersweet comedy,” she says. “I think I always start with an idea that comes before genre, but in the end, I almost always find myself shaping that story through the lens of comedy.” Few moments balance dread and bathos like the arrival of the year 2000, the apocalypse that failed to show. Bittersweet comedy may be the only honest register for it.

The film exists, of course, within a commission. Hogan, founded in 1986 within the Tod's Group on the then-contrarian proposition that a sneaker could be a luxury object, marked its fortieth anniversary by dividing its history into four decades, each identified with an emblematic shoe and each entrusted to a recent graduate of the Centro Sperimentale. Nicolò Folin's Celeste takes the 1980s and the Traditional; Narducci's Nine Hundred the 1990s and the Interactive; Gregorio Mattiocco's Never Off the 2000s and the Olympia; Paoli De Luca's Lola Rebel the 2010s and the Rebel. Less remarked in the brand's materials is a pattern across all four: each film centres on a woman or girl, and in each, the shoe marks the moment she acts on her own behalf. The pattern is sharpened by the Interactive's origin myth. As Hogan tells it, Andrea Della Valle noticed women in New York commuting in trainers and changing into “proper” shoes on arrival. 

Narducci is alert to the lineage. Asked whether that original refusal fed into Mara, she is emphatic: “Absolutely. The moment Mara chooses to wear Hogan sneakers while skateboarding, she reveals herself to be a true standout among non-conformists.” This anniversary initiative is not a one-off; Hogan has also attached five scholarships, each covering three full years at the Centro Sperimentale, for students of directing, acting, screenwriting, editing and production design, signalling a deeper patronage of storytellers. Narducci's assessment is hopeful rather than triumphant. “Commercial work, when approached in this way, represents a massive opportunity for a young filmmaker,” she says. “On top of that, I felt genuinely free on this project.” A commercial brief can be an excellent platform from which young creatives can spring: Hogan fixed the decade and the iconic shoe, and with those tools, Narducci flew to make something recognisably her own. .

Nine Hundred by Sarah Narducci is also being shown on the Tank.tv Fashion Channel.