Sieben Tage Sonntag

Sieben Tage Sonntag is the graduation film by the novice director and producer Niels Laupert. Sixteen days of shooting resulted in a fictional reconstruction of a gruesome deed he read about in the newspaper. In 1996 two 16-year-old Polish kids murdered a man and wounded another victim. After their deed they did not show any remorse and both claimed to be the main culprit. They were sentenced to 25 years in jail.
Looking for motives for their aggressive crime, Laupert could not find any clear clues and his first full-length feature is not an attempt to find a psychological explanation for events. There are hints about neglect, lack of prospects, jealousy and hatred, but these remain minimal. Instead of that, Laupert shows dryly, and hence more penetratingly, in chronological order the sequence of actions on the Sunday in question, when a wager between two competing friends got completely out of hand.
The set, formed in the film by a slum district of Leipzig, offers only a world full of deadly boredom in which the cynical kids have nothing to do other than to compete for the one pretty girl in the area. The director made a virtue of necessity – a small budget – and filmed the two kids without embellishments or unnecessary detours on their road to hell, although no one will ever be sure how much the two of them consciously sought it out.

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