Banal DaysBanal Days

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.