Seven people meet up after thirty years to listen to a radio play. They have sat together in the living room of their shared flat in Vienna once before in the summer of 1972. There was a microphone set up in the middle. The questions were asked by the Austrian author Michael Scharang. The long conversations between these seven Viennese workers were adapted into a radio documentary for the German broadcaster WDR. The cassette cover read "Luck is a little bird". In the spring of 2000 the young filmmaker Elisabeth Scharang plays that audio tape once again. The radio play protagonists from 1972 take on the main roles in her film essay "Normal Times". "Normal Times" is a film about utopian dreams that have come true or been lost forever. It is the story of seven young people in the 1970s who were about to start families, hope for a promotion or become interested in alternative lifestyle concepts. The film tells us about the times when socialist Bruno Kreisky ran for office in order to make his visions of a fairer society come true, yet the reality was that social prosperity was measured in the number of television sets and refrigerators all over the country.
