📷 Photo via Felix Hess
Leon Charo Tite first came on our radar via our friends at the Berlin-based Place Skate Mag. He was featured in their 2020 “Unsigned Hype” series, which was meant to be a showcase of up-and-coming talent through the prism of something more thoughtful than an IG upload. Today, things come full circle, as we are presenting his “CHARO” part, which was filmed and edited by Roland Hoogwater, Place‘s editor-in-chief.
“CHARO” is filmed entirely in Berlin, the place Leon has called home over the past several years. Leon and Roland dig deeper into what the city has to offer than your typical Euro vacation edit hitting the same five central pins — and include an ender on a spot that the crew had been eyeing to fix for a special occasion …namely, when they needed an ender.
When asked if there was anything else we should mention about the part, Roland had this to say: “Leon’s dad is a Kenyan native who was born Alfred ‘Charo’ Tite. The word Charo means ‘road’ in Swahili. He got this middle name because his mother birthed him on a road in Kenya near Mombassa. When Leon was born many years later in Germany, some kind of mix-up occurred and the ‘Charo’ part became part of his official government last name. Last year, when we visited Leon’s family in the south of Germany, we met his mother and his father and he said, ‘Let’s name the part CHARO.’ It felt like the right name for the project because it was quite a long ‘road’ to finish this part.”
Film & Edit: Roland Hoogwater
Additional Filming: Julian Lopez, Eduardo Herrmann, Elia Lang