This Ain't California

2012 • 95 minutes

About this movie

This Ain't California is a celebration of the lust for life, a documentary drama trip into the world of skate boarding in communist East Berlin in the mid 80's. A coming-of-age tale of three teenagers and their passionate love for a sport on the crumbling tarmac of the streets in the German Democratic Republic, at the height of the Stasi secret polices efforts to crush rebellion. The punk fairy tale is a story of the subversive power of fun in that part of Germany, which had lost touch with its citizens. The film follows the rise of skating, hip-hop and break dancing through the 80's, ending in the last summer of the GDR in 1989, when the wall fell, and their lives changed forever.

Ratings and reviews

I saw this film back in 2012 when I was part of a festival jury. What strikes me is that the producers are trying to market it as a documentary, while it is clearly not. At best, this film is a mockumentary. Its protagonists are compositions of several real-life people into cinematically and dramaturgically working characters. The "protagonists" themselves are played by well-known and less well-known actors. The overvoice is of a well-known actor. And unfortunately most of the "original footage" about skaters in the GDR is NOT ORIGFINAL FOOTAGE from some archive, but very smartly re-created footage. You could also say it is "re-enacted". That material looks and feels very authentic - but it is not. In the version I saw there was NO reference in the closing titles about all this. Which is the big problem I have with this film. This COULD be a great film if the producers were sincere about what it is - a dramatized, fictionalized, re-created and very well shaped, colored and "artificially aged" mockumentary. But if I look at the category it is inserted here at Rotten Tomatoes… they apparently still follow the strategy of "don't ask, don't tell".