Normal Times

Seven people meet again after almost thirty years to listen to a radio play. In the living room of the former 68er flat-sharing community in Vienna, they had already sat opposite each other once before in the summer of 1972. There was a microphone in the middle. The Austrian author Michael Scharang asked the questions. A documentary radio play for WDR was created from the long conversations with seven workers from Vienna. "Happiness is a bird" is written on the cassette cover. In the spring of 2000, the young filmmaker Elisabeth Scharang puts the audio cassette in again. The protagonists of the 1972 radio play take on the leading roles in her film essay "Normale Zeiten." "Normale Zeiten" is a film about utopias that have become real and those that have been lost. It is the story of seven young people who wanted to start a family in the early seventies, who hoped to become white-collar workers, or who began to take an interest in alternative concepts of life through committed acquaintances. The film tells of a time when socialist Bruno Kreisky set out to realize his vision of a fairer society, but social prosperity was measured by the density of television sets and refrigerators in the country.