All American High

Shot in a time when friends were made through actual human contact, Keva Rosenfeld's 1987 documentary All American High chronicled a year in the life of Torrance High School in California. Inspired by Amy Heckerling's teen classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), the film viewed the school's educational, sporting and social activities through the eyes of 17-year-old Finnish exchange student Rikki Rauhala. Here, Rosenfeld has remastered the original fly-on-the-wall footage and added a 20-minute coda to reveal how the students have changed over the last three decades - Rauhala watches the film with her three teenage children. It's her outsider perspective that proves vital to the sociological acuity of the original project, as her unfamiliarity with the quirkier aspects of the curriculum and the rituals of adolescence force audiences to reassess conventions many non-Americans will only have experienced through the movies. The prom, homecoming and keg party sequences feel overly familiar, while the last-reel catch up is disappointingly superficial. But the snippets from the classrooms are fascinating, as is the charming pre-reality TV naturalness of the teen subjects.