This Ain't California

It's a wild mixture of old and real snippets that were filmed in the earlier 1980's and new material. For the new material that shows the group in the later 80's they worked with actors. Also in the scenes that claim to show the group in 2011 some of the people are real while others are actors. All that is never explained. Everything that's supposed to show the 80's has the same grainy look. Also the end credits give no clue. They simply list all people involved in front of the camera in alphabetic order. You can not see who is real and who's an actor. Also the character of "Panik" is fiction. I was born in 1973 and grew up in East-Berlin exactly during this era. I also know one of the actors. So when I saw him speaking of himself I knew that he was not telling his own story. Whose story it is I don't know. It might be pure invention as well. I also noticed several mistakes in the additional footage they filmed. What I know for sure is that there were skaters at the Berlin Alexanderplatz in the 80s. Everything else? Could be real – or fake. The problem I see is the way the director and producer handled the project. It took some hard questioning at the press conference at the Berlinale before the director was forced to admit, that parts of the movie are not real. Before he had claimed several times in interviews that it's a documentary. A German magazine (Der Spiegel) had asked the producer for more information about the authenticity of the material. He flatly refused to answer and more or less said that it doesn't matter if something is real or not. I think the audience gets an entirely wrong impression if this movie is called a documentary. It's a feature film – nothing else.

This film is great - but the producers find it OK that many websites continue calling it a documentary, which it is not. This is docu-fiction, very well-done docu-fiction, perhaps too well-done. Because it blurs the borders between what is real (documentary and archive material) and what is fiction. The main plot-line of the film is written and created, exactly as you would do writing a script for a feature film. The main protagonist - PANIK - is a composition of three real-life characters - and I am not inventing this, I am quoting the words of one of the film's producers. During a recent film and television festival, he and the film were heavily attacked by the jury of the documentary section, where the film was inscribed, for not revealing the truth and actually declaring the film to be a documentary. Ultimately, the film was excluded from the documentary category. What is so bad about this whole thing is not the film itself, which is quite brilliant. It is the tactics around it, and the fact that the producers are not at all forthcoming with the truth about their film. They prefer to feed the "mystery" around it instead of saying once and for all: "This ain't a documentary!"

I am sorry, but upon seeing this I had the suspicion it couldn't be quite accurate and by later finding out it probably is a complete fabrication, scripted and acted out, I was feeling played with and lied to. Who likes that? I would think not a great deal of people.

A simple information at the beginning that the story and the material are mostly fictitious would have prepared the viewer that he was watching something of an idealized, wanna be past, that did not happen as presented at all.

I hope those filmmakers will not continue in making "documentaries" but use their imagination more accordingly in different settings. Better luck next time.

For a mockumentary it just isn't funny or interesting enough.

I saw this film last night at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. As a passionate fan of anything related to Germany, I figured I'd enjoy it, and I did. The film revolves around a group of old friends who have gathered to reminisce about one who recently died. The deceased was the central and most popular figure in East Germany's emerging skate culture in the 1980s.

The film's story is told by the friends in personal interviews and with period film clips. Some of the clips are grainy or out of focus, which is understandable, given the time period and the difficulty of obtaining good quality cameras and film in East Germany. Rather than distracting, these clips give the film its authenticity. Life in East Germany was hard, as the friends make clear. Having never lived there, it's difficult to imagine the restrictions (e.g., skateboarding was considered an anti-Socialist activity) they constantly had to deal with.

The story is told with a mixture of humor and sadness, and it was thoroughly enjoyable throughout. It is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, never less than engrossing. The closeness and camaraderie evident among the friends will almost make viewers feel they are part of the story. My spirits rose and fell with them as the details emerged. The film's most important fact is not revealed until a few minutes before the end.

The film is also accompanied by an excellent soundtrack featuring a wide range of genres from techno pop to speed metal. Each tune is appropriately matched to the action in the film. Stay through the closing credits, because the song director Marten Persiel chose to play over them is a perfect summation of what you have just seen. Don't be surprised if you get misty. If this movie comes to a local theater, I will see it again, and I will definitely buy the DVD when it's released.

THIS AIN'T California tells a great story, of the growth and development of the nascent skateboarding culture in East Germany during the Eighties. Told through the biography of one of the leading protagonists in the movement, Dirk (aka Panik), this documentary tells of how a group of friends came together in a local housing estate, and developed their own approach to skateboarding - not necessarily in opposition to the West, but independently of it. Eventually the group came into contact with colleagues from West Germany, as well as other skateboarders from Europe and the United States; and they discovered that the community was far greater than they had anticipated. The group were not necessarily rebelling against communist rule; rather they were creating an alternative world in which personal fulfillment mattered more than collective good. This message is a powerful one; but devalued somewhat by the fact that much of the footage - which claims to be authentic from the Eighties - has been mocked up for the film. Moreover the narrative thrust becomes a little lost as the film unfolds; perhaps there ought to have been less slo-mo shots of the skateboarders in action and more emphasis on the multiple narrators - the group (now middle aged) looking back on their exploits.