People on Sunday

Four young Berliners, a taxi driver, a model, a record salesman and a film extra, spend a Sunday by the Wannsee. They swim, they eat, they flirt, they quarrel, and in the evening they go back to the city. That is the whole story. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer shot it with non-professionals on real locations at weekends; Billy Wilder worked on the script and Fred Zinnemann on the camera crew, and all of them were in their twenties. In the years that followed most of these names left Germany and worked in Hollywood. Made at the end of the silent era, it builds a realism close to street photography and is among the most vivid records of everyday life in prewar Berlin. Who it is for: anyone curious about silent cinema and early realism. Who it is not for: viewers looking for a story, since the film is deliberately uneventful.