Thomas Heise

The disappearance of Peggy Knobloch is one of the most known criminal cases in Germany.

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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.

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With his background in Brechtian theater and the material-like, pure poetic style of his documentaries, Thomas Heise has created his very own kind of filmic expression.

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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 instructions, petitions, letters and photos tell about daily life at different times.

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Every evening at 6:45 p.m. sharp, a prominent guest takes a seat on the red sofa—and DAS! provides daily updates on what's hot in the north.

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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.

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Documentary about a juvenile prison in Mexico City.

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CONSEQUENCE tracks the tiring working day between Christmas Eve and New Year at a small German crematorium operating 24/7.

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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, all in rigid protocol amidst Thuringia’s Catholic enclave. Under the cathedral’s slogan, “We are all together in our beliefs,” Heise quietly asks whether such choreographed faith still holds meaning.

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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.

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"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 history." (Thomas Heise)

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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 Tommy is a troubled child, while the younger Paul is doing well at school and the family has high hopes for him. Heise interacts with her family with openness and caution, without shaming anyone. What emerges is a work about the changing story of a place and the people who live there.

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Over seven years, director Thomas Heise revisits five young actors from his 2007 Berlin staging of Heiner Müller’s “Anatomy Titus.” At irregular intervals, he asks them to film their everyday lives and articulate their hopes. The footage is deliberately fragmentary and non-linear: there is no smooth narrative or causal thread. Among them, 22-year-old Sven, whose apprenticeship, naval stint, dishonorable discharge, and failed relationships leave him convinced “nothing comes next”, becomes the focal point of this long-term observation. Invoking Müller’s own outsider declaration - “I am a Negro” - the film offers a stark, uncompromising portrait of aimless youth while Heise probes his role as documentarian.

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Thomas Heise, noted documentary filmmaker from the former GDR, takes a trip to France to visit his brother Andreas. His brother lives there in a rather unusual situation.

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Documentary by Thomas Heise filmed in East Berlin in 1987/88.

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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 the digging of a hole. If one could dig in spiral form. And dig a black hole. An archaeological journey to landscape, people and things, traces of changing times and transition. Wide open landscapes and detailed drawings of people within. And on entering Otto Nathos’ modest bar, there is always talk of the war. The era of youth.

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Heise's first work produced specifically for television: a small film, the portrait of a pub on Rosenthaler Straße in Berlin Mitte, an homage to a kind of proletarian feeling of belonging together.

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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.

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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.

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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 part of daily life until then began to spread. The general dissolution, perceived as a threat, is countered by apparently clear world views. When Thomas Heise won the “Documentary Film Prize 1992” at the Duisburger Filmwoche, the laudation ended with the assumption that the film would probably provoke disagreement. It turned out to be true.

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Ten years after breaking off the film "Anka and ..." nearly all the protagonists of that time have disappeared. Mario and Tilo hung themselves in the final phase of the GDR, Frank is surviving in West Berlin addicted to drugs, and Karsten is doing pretty well there. Anka, however, who once was in love with each of them, lives alone with her danghter in Eisenhüttenstadt. A film about normality in life.

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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 October come to feel like sitting out the death throes. Careful observation of people and their work as the current of history suddenly becomes perceptible.

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Thomas Heise documents the everyday life of the "People's Police Force" in Berlin Mitte.

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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.

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"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 für Film und Fernsehen der DDR, HFF) in East Germany’s Potsdam-Babelsberg. It was quickly banned from being shown publicly and it remained in storage until the end of 1989. The film tells the story of a mother and her sons having coffee and cake while they try to remember –in vain– when the first time was that they tangled with the police. The reason it was banned was the casual way the film portrayed those young men living their lives untouched by ideology, including taking their careers as petty criminals for granted, meaning the film’s author accepted their existence, as is, and simply wanted to explore it.”

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