FEEL IT.STREAM
Walter Heynowski

Walter Heynowski

Directing

Biography

Walter Heynowski (* November 20, 1927 in Ingolstadt ; † November 6, 2024 in Berlin) was, together with Gerhard Scheumann, one of the most well-known and important documentary and propaganda film directors of the GDR. He also worked as a lyricist, screenwriter, screenwriter, and producer on numerous films.

Known For

Pilots in Pajamas
5.8

Produced by DEFA and broadcast in four parts in 1968, this documentary series consists of extended interviews with ten United States Air Force and Navy pilots captured during bombing missions over North Vietnam. Filmed at Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi, the films focus on the pilots’ backgrounds, military service, and views on the bombing campaign and the war.

Pilots in Pajamas

1968
A Refugee from Vietnam
N/A

After becoming notorious world-wide for a bloody killing, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, former general and chief of the South Vietnamese police, moved to the United States and opened a restaurant outside of Washington, D.C. Contrasting images from these two phases of his life are intercut.

A Refugee from Vietnam

1979
No image
N/A

Portrait of the industrialist Walter Hunger from Frankenberg in Saxony. He left the German Democratic Republic in 1958 with his family and closest colleagues to build up one the most significant hydraulics enterprises in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Walter Hunger - A German Résumé

1991
The Laughing Man
6.8

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk about his life and war campaigns in Africa.

The Laughing Man

1966
No image
7.0

A flat as a human basic right and need; that is what Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary General of the United Nations spoke of in 1987. The trilogy “The Third Skin” is about the persons concerned on five continents: people searching for flats, architects, politicians, estate agents, homeless, UNO experts, construction workers, sociologists and social workers, street kids, pastors, philosophers and jurists. The reason for working on the documentary for two and a half years was the International UNO Year 1987 of Shelter for the Homeless

The Third Skin

1989
The Iron Fortress
10.0

Weeks after the victory in Vietnam, first pictures of a new humanity are captured: old and sick people preparing for their future, children on their way to school.

The Iron Fortress

1977
No image
N/A

At a Bach concert, a letter is read aloud in which the legation council of the Federal Republic of Germany tries to poach the musicians of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Nicosia.

Mit vorzüglicher Hochachtung

1967
Fellow Citizens!
N/A

Salvador Allende’s last radio speech is given in full; nothing is interposed. The translation of the speech appears in subtitles, individual passages are placed into the center of the picture. Film scenes and photos underline Allende’s call to his citizens. The film ends with a slow close-up to the face of the President.

Fellow Citizens!

1974
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N/A

Documentary film

Der Zeuge

1967
Phoenix
10.0

The goal of the American operation "Phoenix" in Vietnam was to destroy all the bases of the liberation struggle. K. Barton Osborn, a former "Phoenix" officer, who publicly disassociated himself from it, talks about his experiences as a CIA agent. They are confirmed by the statements of General Bui Van Nhu, the last chief of the South Vietnamese police

Phoenix

1979
Globke heute
N/A

Portrait of Hans Globke, jurist at the ministry of interior during the Third Reich and co-author of an official commentary to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Nazi Racial Legislation. While Adenauer appointed him Secretary of State in 1953, he was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in absentia by a GDR court in 1963.

Globke heute

1963
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N/A

Through interviews, the film reconstructs the life stories of eight former NATO generals from the FRG, France, Greece, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal.

The Generals

1986
Brothers and Sisters
N/A

A few days after the GDR built the Berlin Wall, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer commented that this was "an infamous and brutal act against our brothers and sisters in the Zone." Director Walter Heynowski digs into this ubiquitous West German expression, using footage from West German newsreels and TV programs, and compares the life of "brothers and sisters" in East and West Germany. In this propagandistic documentary, the director juxtaposes images of class hierarchy and conflict in the West, with images of a flourishing East.

Brothers and Sisters

1963
I Was, I Am, I Will Be
7.5

In the spring of 1974, a camera team from Studio H&S succeeded against the explicit orders of the Junta’s Chancellery, entered into two large concentration camps in the north of the country - Chacabuco and Pisagua - leaving with filmed sequences and sound recordings.

I Was, I Am, I Will Be

1974
A Pillar In The Stream
N/A

The story of communist Walter Zauner who in 1952 was one of the first in the Federal Republic to be convicted of sabotage of a military installation.

A Pillar In The Stream

1983
The Dead Are Not Silent
9.0

Moy de Tohá and Isabel Letelier tell their story. They are the widows of two Defence Ministers of the Unidad Popular, who knew too much.

The Dead Are Not Silent

1978
O.K.
5.1

In a reception camp for ethnic Germans in Eisenach, the director gets to know the girl Doris S. who went to West Germany and came back. This film interview tells the story of her individual fate in a divided Germany.

O.K.

1965
100
N/A

Push-ups to the rhythm of a metronome, a meter counting backward from 100; three words are shouted time and again: “dog – pig – monkey”.

100

1971
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N/A

Chile 1985, the repression of the Chilean people by the dictatorship and the resistance, accompanied by the music of the exiled composer Angel Parra.

Snapshots From Chile

1986
Bye-Bye Wheelus
10.0

Wheelus Air Base was once the largest American air base outside the USA itself. Ordered to be cleared by June 30th, 1970 by Libya’s Revolutionary Command Council.

Bye-Bye Wheelus

1971