None of the five people on screen had ever acted before, and none of them ever would again. They played versions of themselves, using their own names, spending a Sunday exactly as they might have spent it anyway.

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (1930), or Menschen am Sonntag, follows a taxi driver, a record shop clerk, a wine seller, a film extra, and a model as they escape Berlin for a day at the lake. The camera catches them flirting, napping, squabbling, and posing for snapshots, and treats all of it as worth watching.

The crew making it was just as unknown at the time. Billy Wilder and Curt Siodmak wrote it, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer directed it, and a young Fred Zinnemann worked as an assistant cameraman. All of them would leave Germany within a few years and become major figures in Hollywood.

Shot on a shoestring with non-actors and real locations, the film mixes documentary footage of Berlin street life with staged scenes of ordinary romance and boredom. It has no professional lighting, no studio sets, no trained performers, only a city, a lake, and five people willing to be filmed living an ordinary day.