Commissioned to make a working-class family drama, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) took the assignment and ran, upending expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective. Over the course of several hours, the sprawling story tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen (Gottfried John, Berlin Alexanderplatz) and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves (Hanna Schygulla, The Marriage of Maria Braun), his eccentric nuclear family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory floor. Rarely screened since its popular but controversial initial broadcast, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day rates as a true discovery, one of Fassbinder’s earliest and most tender experiments with the possibilities of melodrama.
This new 2K digital restoration of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day was created using the 16 mm reversal positive, which was digitized and restored by ARRI, under the artistic direction of Juliane Maria Lorenz. Funding was provided by the Museum of Modern Art, Filmförderungsanstalt, Film und Medien Stiftung NRW, ARRI Media, the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, RWF Werkschau, and Verlag der Autoren.
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Please note, there will be a 20-minute intermission following Episode 2.
