This Ain't California

It wasn’t only in sunny California that young people became enchanted with skateboarding. As Marten Persiel’s movie demonstrates, at the beginning of the 1980s a group of skate enthusiasts came together in the GDR: for them, riding “wheel-boards” was more than just nipping out for a bit of fun. Skateboarding became the ideal means of livening up the overbearing drudgery of life under a totalitarian regime. Using black-and-white animation, a lighthearted retro-soundtrack, and countless archive amateur shots, the moviemakers take a closer look at the inception of the skateboarding subculture in East Berlin. The sudden death of one of the first East German skateboarders, Denis Paraceck, provided the impulse for a group of friends to get together to fondly reminisce about a time when skateboarding was, more than anything, a symbol of freedom and mutual friendship. Mercifully, this wittily edited movie avoids all those romanticizing clichés put to such plentiful use elsewhere for purposes of “ostalgia” – nostalgia for East Germany. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)