This Ain't California
Thursday, October 4 at 7:30 pm
Castro Theatre
In Person: Director Marten Persiel and Producer Ronald Vietz
California Premiere
Closing Night Party at 9:30 pm following the film.
Commercial filmmaker and lifelong skater Marten Persiel’s documentary is a high intensity bacchanal of Super 8 flashbacks, ultra-short jeans shorts, grainy TV advertisements, naked girls and political upheaval. Colonizing the then-empty concrete expanse of the Alexanderplatz with board in hand, East German skaters were an immediate threat to the rigid GDR regime, which responded to the sport’s populist support by unsuccessfully trying to institutionalize it, creating “skating schools” and an international competitive team. Crosscutting amazing footage of the halcyon days of “roller boarding” with timely news footage to blistering 1980s German punk, This Ain’t California detonates the explosive story of one of the first skateboard crews behind the Berlin Wall. —Jackson Scarlett
Germany (2012), 90 min. (digital projection); in German with English subtitles
Director: Marten Persiel
Writers: Marten Persiel, Ira Wedel
Production: Wildfremd Production
About Marten Persiel
Filmmaker, author and commercial director Marten Persiel is a nomad and somewhat of an oddball. After a 12 year long odyssey through England, Spain, Brazil and the Philippines, he returned to his birthplace Berlin in 2008, bringing home four documentaries, countless award-winning commercials and an excellent network of filmmakers and producers all around the world. Persiel’s trademarks are his close bonds with his protagonists and his very own, off-key aesthetics. He always searches for unusual, less restrictive narrative formats to tell his stories. This Ain’t California, a project particularly dear to Persiel, will mark a climax in this quest thus far. —Wildfremd Production
