Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit

A family film that stretches from Wilhelmine Germany to the present day. A history lesson made from the ruins and monuments of private lives. A lesson in montage, in which nothing is illustrated and certainly nothing is arbitrary. Thomas Heise's film is a chronicle of his own family: four generations, two central cities (Vienna and Berlin), two world wars, the Shoa, the GDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Letters and documents from private and public archives, recited by Heise from off-screen; plus historical photographs and film images of present-day locations. What is this - a ‘space of time’? The archive in and of itself, as a place where testimonies of the past can be made to speak and be put in relation to each other? And perhaps this also refers to cinema itself: as a kind of archaeological practice in which ‘material’ (the title of Heise's previous archive film from 2011) is sifted through and formed into images of the past and we witness how history is written as we progress through time. Thomas Heise's film provides no instructions on how we should understand loaded terms such as ‘home’, ‘space’ and ‘time’. Hardly any other contemporary filmmaker negotiates the relationship between film and history, archive and present, image and sound with such aplomb. (Michael Loebenstein)

With the kind permission of Filmgarten Filmverleih

Photo: Austrian Film Museum