Slomo

A neurologist trades medicine for rollerblades and finds divinity.

On the boardwalk at Pacific Beach, an enigmatic figure glides past the crowds every day in a kind of religious routine. His wrinkled face radiates a genuine sense of freedom that most passers-by cannot name. The locals know him by sight, they cheer and wave as he skates by in slow motion, but almost nobody knows who he really is or where he came from.

Slomo, directed by Josh Izenberg, reveals the remarkable backstory of that figure: Dr. John Kitchin, a North Carolina native who built a successful career as a neurologist in San Diego before walking away from all of it. Disillusioned with a life that had become defined by material reward rather than meaning, he moved into a modest studio by the ocean and reinvented himself as Slomo, spending his days balanced on one foot, working with gravity to propel himself down the boardwalk in a state of sustained bliss.

The film is not simply a portrait of an unusual local character. Through intimate interviews and inventive cinematography by Wynn Padula, Izenberg gives Kitchin the space to articulate a coherent philosophy grounded in his neurological knowledge: the sensation of slow-motion skating, he explains, activates the same neural pathways associated with profound well-being. What looks like eccentricity turns out to have a rigorous inner logic.

In a remarkable narrative synthesis, the short film blends time-lapse, slow-motion footage, and animation to place the viewer inside the experience of skating on the Pacific Beach boardwalk. It was selected as a New York Times Op-Doc and went on to win over a dozen festival awards, including Best Short Documentary at SXSW, Sheffield DocFest, and the International Documentary Association, as well as Audience Awards at AFI Docs and Ashland Independent Film Festival.