PEOPLE ON SUNDAY

‘Menschen am Sonntag’, also known in Italy as ‘Gente di domenica’, is a film designed and made in 1929 by a group of friends, artists and filmmakers, the Siodmak brothers, Fred Zinnemann, Edgar Ulmer and ‘Billy’ Wilder, who a few years later were forced to leave Germany because of anti-Semitism and the war in order to make a career in Hollywood. ‘Menschen am Sonntag’ is a film that breaks the traditional mould and the rigid production and commercial rules of UFA, Germany’s leading film production company, by expressing the joy of life of two boys and two girls on an anonymous Sunday spent together at one of the lakes in the Berlin belt. The story is barely sketched out, but the four characters play themselves and all the interest is concentrated on the atmosphere and the careful observation of the little things of everyday life: laziness, spite, smiles, attraction, kisses, swimming, walks and encounters of many faces and many people on a Berlin Sunday in 1929, still without the scourge of Nazism in power, far from the war and full of optimism.
The documentary style of the filming, in the tradition of the city’s ‘symphonies’, is synthesised with the lightness of a love comedy, while the sparse dialogue conveys the naturalness of everyday life in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. The film is presented with four different selectable soundtracks (El Muniria with Massimo Carozzi and Emidio Clementi, Tiziano Popoli and Sonata Islands, Loïc Dijan, Elena Kats-Chernin) as part of a project organised by Bolzano’s ‘Rimusicazioni Film Festival’.