*From April 6 - June 30, Icarus Films is making Heimat Is a Space In Time available to stream via their website. Your screening of the film directly supports Acropolis Cinema and the Lumiere Music Hall during our temporary hiatuses.

In Heimat Is a Space in Time, 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.

​

Heimat Is a Space in Time 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  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.