24-hour television documentary about Berlin and its inhabitants, reporting in real time on the everyday lives of more than 50 protagonists from a wide range of professions, social classes, religions and ethnicities.
Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.
Thomas Heise’s film reframes Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2011 visit to Erfurt not as a triumphal “Pope-mania” spectacle but as a meticulously orchestrated state ritual. In austere black-and-white, the omnipresent pontiff yields to police, snipers, security guards and a nervous premier,...
Bucharest, October 1989: a secondary school student disappears without a trace. Weeks later, he resurfaces at a meeting of the Communist Youth where he is denounced for certain "reprehensible actions" and excluded from the organization. As a result of the same "reprehensible" deeds he is expelled...
In Saxon-Anhalt, near the town of Zerbst, set away from busy roads, next to a deserted military landing strip, is the village of Straguth. An unimportant place. Lost in time. Or ahead of time. The film describes the people of this quiet place, in the past, the present and the future. A film like...
"Pictures from the late eighties in the GDR on up to the immediate present in the year 2008 in Germany. What has been left over besieges my mind. All these pictures keep reassembling themselves to make up something which they were originally not made for. They are still in motion. They are becoming...
Solar System is a film about disappearance. It is a portrait of daily life in the indigenous community of the Kollas in Tinkunaku in the mountains of northern Argentina.
DETECTION. Consideration of past, present and future of a small village in Germany. For over a century — wars and states went by — the military is the largest employer. The everyday life of the community is inextricably linked to the events on the nearby military training area. Diaries, daily...
In Bettina Büttner’s exquisitely lucid documentary Kinder (Kids), childhood dysfunction, loneliness, and pent-up emotion run wild at an all-boys group home in southern Germany. The children interned here include ten-year-olds Marvin and Tommy. Marvin, fiddling with a mini plastic Lego sword,...
"This was my first student documentary. I shot it over the Easter vacation in 1980 on 16mm, black-and-white reversal film. Apart from two five-minute exercises, it was destined to be the only film I ever finished at the College of Film and Television of the German Democratic Republic (Hochschule...
Eight years after the first cinematic encounter with right-wing extremist youths in Halle Neustadt, Thomas Heise revisits the protagonists and their families at the turn of the century.
The documentary relates how in the second half of the 20th century the agent Berthold Barluschke was first a henchman of the State Security Service of the GDR and then of the West German Federal Intelligence Service.
The lower level of Lichtenberg Station in Belin in early October 1989: the beginning of the end for the GDR. In the snack bar, the staff are catering for travellers of every kind while in the background the authorities maintain a flow of triumphal statements, but those months between August and...
A group of young people in Halle-Neustadt moving aimlessly between the concrete blocks once built as a socialist model housing estate. Familiar certainties dissolved along with the GDR. Even though there were hardly any foreigners in Saxony-Anhalt, a dull aversion to everything that hadn’t been...
The third part of Thomas Heise's time-lapse observation, in which he accompanies the people of Saxony-Anhalt. At the centre of the film is Jeanette, who grew up with four brothers and became pregnant at 15. In the meantime, however, she fulfilled her dream and became a bus driver. Her eldest son...
Thomas Heise's documentary portrays the meeting of officials and citizens in the district office of Berlin-Mitte in 1984. The movie uniquely displays how socialist officals and citizens interact.
