An alternate cinema from Germany

The German Film Office is pleased to co-present a special screening of Peter Welz’s 1991 film Banal Days with Deutsche Kinemathek and the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst. With an introduction by Deutsche Kinemathek curator Annika Haupts. Please register to attend.

East Berlin, 1978. Thomas is a toolmaker apprentice, and Michael is a high school student. Thomas’ father is a worker, while Michael’s is a dramaturg at the Volksbühne theater. The two young men are at odds with their fathers, with authority figures like their teachers, and with a paternalistic society that demands conformity and does not let young people follow their own paths. When Michael’s father proclaims a new play as “subversive” and it turns out to denounce youth culture and Thomas leads a protest against it, the East German secret police enter the picture…
Banal Days was 27-year-old Peter Welz’s feature debut. It was produced by the East German DEFA film studios’ young directors’ group “DaDaEr” and marked a radical break with DEFA’s formal and aesthetic norms. After two short films based on scripts by theater directors Frank Castorf and Leander Haußmann, Welz tried a new cinematic language: experimental, ironic, farcical. The outcome is a swansong for East Germany that is as sharp as it is scathing, full of allusions to the absurdity of daily life and the corruption of culture in the socialist state.

Banal Days won a Max Ophüls Prize in 1991.

(Adapted from a note by the Berlin International Film Festival.)

Banale Tage
Dir. Peter Welz
Germany, 1991
92 min.
With Christian Kuchenbuch, Florian Lukas, Kurt Naumann, Jörg Panknin, Ronald M. Schernikau, Bärbel Rolle, Ernst-Georg Schwill, Rolf Peter Kahl

Further screenings highlighting rarely seen, newly restored films from the Deutsche Kinemathek archives take place at Metrograph (New York) and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles).