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.
Review of This Ain't California
