Thomas Heise

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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Under the artistic direction of director Andreas Dresen, 20 renowned documentary filmmakers, experienced television writers, and teams tell stories about the country and its people. The teams filmed at 20 different locations between June and August 2010 under the same production conditions: four days of filming, one week of editing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, explains matter-of-factly to the camera, “This is a knife. You use it to cut stomachs open.” Dennis, who is even younger, is seen in a hysteric fit, mimicking some pornographic scene. Boys will be boys, but innocence is disproportionately spare here. Choosing not to dwell on the harsh specifics, Büttner reveals the disconcerting manner in which traumatic episodes can manifest themselves in the mundane — a game of Lego, Hide and Seek, or Truth or Dare. Filmed in lapidary black-and-white, Büttner’s fascinating film sheds light on childhood from the boys’ characteristically disadvantaged perspective — one not yet fully cognizant — leaving much ethically to ponder over.

Documentary about a juvenile prison in Mexico City.

"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)

"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.”

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.

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 from the school. His schoolmates are never told what his actions actually were. "Notorious deeds, unworthy of being mentioned," is the only comment provided by a high-level communist party representative. Now, 25 years later, those involved are keen to tell their side of the story.