Special screening of Peter Welz’s 1991 feature film debut as part of “An Alternate Cinema” series

In 2024, the Berlin International Film Festival’s Retrospective “An Alternate Cinema” celebrated unconventional protagonists, idiosyncratic film languages, and unconventional productions from a German film history that lies beyond the internationally known canon. The majority of the titles came from the collections of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

The German Film Office is pleased to announce that, this December, the Deutsche Kinemathek will travel stateside to bring rarely seen, newly restored films from their archives to New York and Los Angeles. Join curator Annika Haupts and filmmakers Pia Frankenberg and Michael Brynntrup for screenings at the the Goethe-Institut New York, Metrograph, and the Academy Museum.

Please join us for a special opening night screening of Peter Welz’s 1991 film Banal Days, co-presented 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 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.

Banal Days won a Max Ophüls Prize in 1991.

(Adapted from notes by the DEFA Foundation and 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).