Co-Production of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj, the Mladinsko Theatre,
the Ptuj City Theatre, and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb
The performance Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is based on the eponymous television
series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag, created in the 1970s from a screenplay by Rainer
Werner Fassbinder. The series follows the everyday life of a working-class family, whose
private relationships are inseparably intertwined with labour in a factory producing
machine parts. At its centre stands the love story between Jochen, a factory worker,
and Marion, an employee in the newspaper classifieds department, alongside a series of
situations generated by the rhythms and tensions of industrial production.
In Fassbinder’s work, people are capable of transforming the world around them
through solidarity, directness and an uncompromising confrontation with reality. Their
struggle is not heroic, nor is it an all-or-nothing battle in which life is sacrificed for convictions.
Change becomes possible precisely through everyday persistence, courage and
the refusal to submit to rigid institutions or inherited social habits.
The performance is divided into two parts. The first unfolds within the realistic
and familiar space of the family home, while the second shifts to the factory floor,
opening up questions of labour, exploitation and collective responsibility, where private
intimacy inevitably collides with production.
Fassbinder’s series is striking in its departure from his more familiar aesthetics
and recurring preoccupations with social outsiders, as well as political and sexual extremity.
There is no blood, no nudity, no brazen shocks or brutal ruptures. Instead, the
entire work is infused with a quiet anarchic energy that gradually and almost imperceptibly
takes hold of the viewer.
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, a co-production of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj, the
Mladinsko Theatre, the Ptuj City Theatre, and the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb,
will be directed by Slovenian director Sebastijan Horvat.
