Mother's Day

Forty-eight hours of a May weekend in one of Vienna's municipal housing blocks. The Neugebauer family have planned a quiet celebration for Mother's Day, and everyone else in the block is making similar preparations. As the day goes on the preparations come apart: family accounts are opened, neighbours turn on each other, the celebration slides out of control. The film presents this not as a catastrophe but as an ordinary weekend. It became a cult black comedy in Austria and its humour is entirely local: the language of the housing block, the Viennese accent, the friction between neighbours. The cast comes largely from the same cabaret troupe and the playing works on stage timing. Harald Sicheritz neither defends the family nor sneers at them; he just shows what goes on behind the doors. Alfred Dorfer and Roland Düringer were the best-known faces in Austrian comedy at the time.