This Ain't California

Summary

A hymn to the subversive power of vitality, this fast-paced documentary takes us on a trip through the strange unknown world of the ‘Rollbrettfahrer’ as skateboarders were known in the GDR, a country where besides those loyal to the regime, there was also an avowed political resistance. Apart from this, there was also a movement of young rebels whose only raison d’être was the illusion of staying young, immortal and non-committal. In "This ain't California" three kids discover their love of skateboarding on the cracked asphalt of the GDR – a madcap, even unacceptable sport that was perhaps so incredibly exciting because of its nuttiness. This punk fairytale created by a bunch of kids who luckily possessed sufficiently manic levels of energy to record their lives on Super-8mm film, shows us life in the GDR life as it has never been seen before. The film follows its three main protagonists from their childhood in the seventies, through their turbulent teens in the eighties right up to that autumn of 1989 when they were twenty and suddenly, everything they had known up to that point was about to change forever.

Source: 62. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)