Movies: Thomas Heise

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 2...

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

Documentary about a juvenile prison in Mexico City....

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....

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....

"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...

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 th...

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....

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 ne...

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....

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...

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....

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...

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....

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....

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 deliberat...

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 o...

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

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, ...

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...