Heimat is a Space in Time
Casa è uno Spazio nel Tempo
by
MOVIE CATEGORY
Director Thomas Heise traces the history of his family for four generations, through a century of German history, rediscovering traces, places, photographs, written texts. The urgency of grandfather Wilhelm’s anti-war essays are brought to present ears as much as the testimonies of the Nazi period and the decades of the Berlin Wall, because everything is brought back to the bare image and the unadorned, clear, significant word. The film is thus monolithic but skeletal, grandiose but essential, universal but personal, an epic clash between what remains and what disappears, and on how in practice our present perception of History is constructed starting from the labile border that exists between visible and invisible, between tangible remnants and hidden legacies. The work of sound design, which is fundamental in the reception of the film as an overwhelmingly sensorial experience, made the aesthetic fortune of the last great film by the late Thomas Heise.
DIRECTORY
He was born in Berlin in 1955 and has lived in East Germany where, after military service, he began working in 1975 for DEFA, the film association of the GDR. He studied at the Potsdam-Babelsberg Film and Television Academy between 1978 and 1983, making his first documentary, So Why Make a Film About These People? (1980). He worked as a freelance writer and theatre director, as well as a documentary director, although many of his films were censored or confiscated until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since 2007 ha has been professore of Film and Media Art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, while his films were presented at festivals such as Berlin, BAFICI, Dok Leipzig and Visions du Réel. He died in May 2024.
