Art house: a cold war tale of rebellion in This Ain’t California

A film about the birth of skateboarding in communist East Germany, This Ain't California had its world premiere at the 2012 Berlinale. Billed as a documentary, it went on to win the festival's dialogue en perspective prize, with the award's jury stating of its editing: "We've rarely been so splendidly manipulated."

It turns out they were right in more ways than one. While grounded in the acknowledged truth of an East German skateboard scene, Marten Persiel's "documentary tale" is made up almost entirely of re-creations, and performed by actors. The 8mm and 16mm footage supposedly shot by teenagers is in fact the work of professional cinematographers.

Still, This Ain't California is in its own way an exciting, engaging experience - an incredible meditation on what it meant to be young during the cold war, and what it means to be older and look back through the prism of time.

The film's director has captured the energy and environment of 1980s East Germany, and in so doing greatly redeems any cinematic deception. In fairness, Persiel would have been forced to recreate these scenes even if he didn't want to. Any archival footage of a nascent, illicit youth movement in a repressive communist regime from three decades ago is unlikely to exist.