This Virtual Cinema screening is presented as part of a unique partnership between the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, the film's distributor, Icarus Films, Acropolis Cinema, and the Lumiere Music Hall. Your purchase of a ticket to a virtual screening of the film directly supports Acropolis Cinema and the Lumiere Music Hall.
PURCHASE A TICKET TO HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME
Germany/Austria (2019), 218 min., German with English Subtitles
Director/Screenplay/Narration: Thomas Heise, Cinematography: Stefan Neuberger, Camera (Berlin): Peter Badel, Börres Weiffenbach, Camera Assistant Austria: Christoph Varga, Sound: Johannes Schmelzer-Ziringer, Sound Editing: Markus Krohn, Mixing: Martin Steyer, Editing: Chris Wright, Producer: Heino Deckert
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.
Heise's film 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 A SPACE IN TIME 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.
Source: Icarus Films
SELECT AWARDS & FESTIVALS:
-Caligari Film Prize, Berlin Film Festival 2019
-Best Documentary, German Film Critics Awards 2020
-Jury Prize, RIDM Documentary Festival Montreal 2019
-Best Film, SWR Documentary Film Festival 2019
-Best Documentary, Crossing Europe Festival 2019
-North American Premiere, Toronto International Film Festival 2019
-U.S. Premiere, New York Film Festival 2019
-Visions du Réel 2019
This Virtual Cinema screening is presented as part of a unique partnership between the film's distributor, Icarus Films, Acropolis Cinema, and the Lumiere Music Hall.
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