About this Event
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.
East Berlin, 1978. 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 desire to rebel 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 secret police.
Banal Days was 27-year-old Peter Welz’s feature film 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.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York, United States
USD 0.00