What: In person screening of “Heimat is a Space in Time” a 2019 German-Austrian documentary by Thomas Heise about the German past. This is the first in person public screening of “Heimat is a Space in Time” beyond festivals in the United States.
Sponsors: New York Leo Baeck Institute, American Council on Germany, Society & Diplomatic Review, Law Office of Michael Mueller
When: Tuesday March 28 from 5:30 – 9::30 PM
Where: Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011
Speakers: Introducing the documentary after a brief reception, the screening of HEIMAT will be presented at 6:00 PM by Markus Krah, Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute and Wolfram von Heynitz, German Deputy Consul General in New York
Background: Using the Heise family archive the director reconstructs close to 100 years of his family and friends’ life in Germany and Austria. The documentation of their experience in the German fascist, capitalist, socialist, and post-unification periods challenges common preconceptions. Growing up in socialist East Germany, the DDR, with roots in a German-Jewish family and raised in an intellectual setting, Thomas Heise is sophisticated observer and makes viewers reflect about the German past and presence, the film received many awards. It is 218 minutes long and will be shown without a break. It can be accessed online through Icarus Films.
Note: the film is 218 minutes and will be shown without intermission. Join us at 5:30 PM for a brief reception. The screening will begin promptly at 6:00 PM.
In Heimat is a Space in Time (Germany, 2019), German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.
Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, when he was a schoolboy. The director uses the same matter-of-fact, uninflected tone throughout the film – as he reads letters and notes from relatives who lived through the horrors of the First World War, Nazi Germany, and then life in Communist East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Heimat is a Space in Time defies easy description. Heise offers no context, no talking heads, no analysis. Yet this unadorned approach, coupled with the potent imagery accompanying the words, is one of the documentary’s greatest strengths. One particularly memorable sequence involves Heise’s grandparents, a “mixed” Jewish-Gentile couple living in Vienna during the Nazi era. Their letters capture the increasing measures taken against Jews: banned from buses, losing access to coal ration cards, and lastly being forced to a concentration camp in Poland. All the while, as Heise reads, lists with the names of Jews slated for deportation scroll by on the screen for nearly half an hour.
Clearly influenced by his own previous work (much of it banned in the former East Germany, where he lived until the fall of the Berlin Wall), Heimat is the culmination of Heise’s career. It is an understated epic that brilliantly marries the written word, image, and sound design. The unspoken message is that the past, even as those who remember it slip away, remains with us.
About the Filmmaker
Thomas Heise was born in East Berlin. He worked as a directors' assistant at DEFA, the East German state film production enterprise, and studied at the Konrad Wolf Academy for Film and Television before dropping out to produce his own documentary projects, none of which were screened in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, his over 20 documentary features and shorts include his award-winning Halle-Neustadt trilogy: Jammed: Let's Get Moving (92), New Town: The State of Things (00), and Children. As Time Flies (07). Heimat is a Space in Time (19) is his latest film.