Apr 25th 2020

50% of all proceeds go to Facets to support us during the closure. Please note that virtual cinema screenings are hosted by outside distributors and you will leave Facets’ website to complete your viewing experience.

Director Thomas Heise was born in East Berlin, and his first films were blocked from release until the fall of the GDR in 1990. Over the past three decades, he has worked as a director of both theatre and documentary films, exploring the profound cultural and political changes through this tumultuous period of German reunification.

Heise’s latest, Heimat is a Space in Time, is a monumental work that traces four generations of his family’s archives, from the 19th century to the present, their intimate stories revealing the larger cultural and political events that have shaped the past hundred years of German history. Stretching from the dawn of World War I to the present day, this essay film reflects on the fraught evolution of Germany’s national identity through the prism of one family’s history. Shot in monochrome black-and-white, it combines a wealth of archival footage and materials, including letters written by Heise’s grandparents during the war, with new footage in which the director traces his country’s national trauma to the very sites and landscapes that once played host to unspeakable violence. As he visualizes his ancestors’ forced displacement across East and West Germany, Heise achieves a moving meditation on the relationship between home and heritage.

Directed by Thomas Heise, Germany/Austria, 2019, 218 mins. In German and Korean with English subtitles.

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