Director

Fred Zinnemann

2: briefs
13:00: average
26 min: in total

On film.briefs2

People on Sunday

Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann · 1930

A 1930 German silent film shot on location over several Sundays, People on Sunday follows five Berliners — a wine seller, a taxi driver, a record clerk, a film extra, and a model — through a weekend of minor encounters, quiet arguments, and lakeside leisure. Made by a collective of young filmmakers including Billy Wilder and the Siodmak brothers, it uses non-professional actors playing versions of themselves, and relies on observation rather than plot. Its power lies in its unadorned realism, its rhythmic editing, and its poignant, unsentimental view of ordinary life in the final years of the Weimar Republic.

13:00

Redes

Fred Zinnemann, Emilio Gómez Muriel · 1936

A 1936 Mexican fiction film shot on location in Alvarado, Redes depicts fishermen resisting exploitation through collective action. Directed by Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, written by John Dos Passos, and scored by Silvestre Revueltas, it uses non-professional actors, Paul Strand’s stark cinematography, and a politically grounded script to render poverty as material condition rather than moral allegory. Though its narrative scaffolding is thin, its formal coherence — in image, sound, and rhythm — makes it a singular work of interwar cinematic socialism.