Banal Days
(2025, original release: 1990)

Fiction

eVideo

Provider: Kanopy

Details

PUBLISHED
DEFA Film Library, 1990
[San Francisco, California, USA] : Kanopy Streaming, 2025
DESCRIPTION

1 online resource (streaming video file) (92 minutes): digital, .flv file, sound

ISBN/ISSN
16668556
LANGUAGE
German
NOTES

Title from title frames

East Berlin in the late 1970s. Thomas is a toolmaker apprentice with a working-class background, and Michael is a high-school student from an educated middle-class family. They meet one night at a club and quickly bond over their rebellion against their fathers, teachers, and supervisors in a paternalistic society that does not let young people follow their own paths. When Thomas decides to break the rules by squatting in a vacant apartment and distributing protest flyers, no one seems to care—except for the Stasi. This surreal and absurd comedy, the directorial full-length film debut of Peter Welz, breaks with mainstream East German film practices and offers a subversive collage of East German society in the late 1970s.The film, produced by DaDaeR, DEFA’s production group for young directors, marked a radical break with the formal and aesthetic DEFA norms. This feature debut by 27-year-old Peter Welz, who had made shorts based on scripts by Frank Castorf and Leander Haussmann, tried a new kind of cinematic language. The film was largely shot at the Volksbühne in Berlin

Film

In Process Record

Christian Kuchenbuch, Florian Lukas, Jörg Panknin, Kurt Naumann

Originally produced by DEFA Film Library in 1990

Mode of access: World Wide Web

Additional Credits