Director: Keva Rosenfeld (2015)

This warm and affectionate documentary is a surprisingly candid account of the lives of pupils who attended a US high school in the 1980’s.

Our amusement at their naivety is tempered by compassion when thirty years later the filmmakers track down various key students to catch up on their lives.

In 1984 Keva Rosenfeld shot All American High, a chronicle of the experience of the senior class at Torrance High School in California.

After a brief life in cinemas, it languished on a shelf.

Torrance High was a prosperous and predominantly white school populated by cheerleaders, jocks, prom queens, punks and preppies.

They’re indifferent to the educational exhortations of their well-meaning teachers, most of whom sport unfortunate facial hair.

In contrast to the digitised present where teenagers use smartphones to document their lives online, back then it was a novelty to record the teenage experience.

My experience of US High school is drawn exclusively from watching movies of the period, particularly the films of John Hughes such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

It’s fascinating and alarming how accurate those fictional portrayals were.

There are marching bands, parties, ball games, shopping trips, eating contests and low level political debate about the possibility of nuclear war.

At times it acts as an anthropological study of the mating rituals of American teens. Sex and drugs are dealt with in a jokey, dismissive manner – but there are hints not everybody was having a great time.

Finnish exchange student Rikki Rauhala provides narration and an outsiders eye. Later we catch up with Rikki and her teenage children as they watch the documentary together.

An optimistic teen has matured into a grounded adult but others are not so fortunate.

The filmmakers appear only briefly. They allow the students to speak for themselves and if they have a proxy mouthpiece, it’s probably the philosophical surf instructor.

★★★☆☆