Banal Days
(Banale Tage)
Banale Tage © DEFA-Stiftung
| Welz, Peter |
| Micheal Sollorz |
| Micheal Sollorz |
| Timothy Grossmann |
| Hiller, Rita |
| Karin Esther Ritterbusch |
| Stelzig, Ulrike |
| Wrede, Bert |
| Astrid Meyerfeldt |
| Bolle, Bärbel |
| Florian Lukas |
| Herbst, Anita |
| Karin Mikityla |
| Kuchenbuch, Christian |
| Naumann, Kurt |
| Panknin, Jörg |
| Schwill, Ernst-Georg |
| Simone Walter |
| DEFA Studio Babelsberg GmbH |
Synopsis
East Berlin, 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 desire to rebel against their fathers, teachers and supervisors in a paternalistic society that does not let young people follow their own paths and dreams. 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.
Commentary
Banal Days was 27-year-old Peter Welz’s feature film debut. It was produced by the East German DEFA Film Studio's young directors’s group “DaDaEr,” which represented a new, unconventional aesthetic for GDR filmmaking. After two short films based on scripts by theater directors Frank Castorf and Leander Haußmann, Welz tried a new experimental, ironic and farcical cinematic language. 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.
Awards
| 2024 | Retrospective An Alternate Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival, Germany |
| 1991 | Interfilm Jury Prize, Max Ophüls Festival, Saarbrücken, Germany |
Press comments
“Surrealistically inspired feature-length debut by director Peter Welz, visibly influenced by the grotesque imagery of theater director Frank Castorf, in whose Berlin Volksbühne the film is partly set.” —Lexikon des Internationales Films “The film, by the DEFA’s young director’s group DaDaeR, marked a radical break with the formal and aesthetic DEFA norms.” —Berlin International Film Festival
“The film, by the DEFA’s young director’s group DaDaeR, marked a radical break with the formal and aesthetic DEFA norms.” —Berlin International Film Festival
“Banal Days shows, sometimes absurdly grotesque, the attempt of two boys to break out of the encrusted structures of GDR society at the end of the 1970s.“ —Heinz Kersten, Der Tagesspiegel
"The film observes with great understanding the search for orientation of two young people from different milieus, and in doing so, it succeeds with unruly humor in taking stock of the GDR in detail, without offering us simple solutions for our common future." —Max Ophüls Film Festival
"(...) a remarkable cinematic-artistic screen experience of whimsical subtlety and original design." —Dieter Strunz, Berliner Morgenpost, January 30, 1992
