Heimat is a Space in Time picks up the biographical pieces of a family torn apart through the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. It is about people who found each other by chance, only then to lose each other. Now it is their descendants, their children and grandchildren who are beginning to disappear. This is all about speaking and silence. First love and happiness lost. Fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, the affairs, the hurt and the joy in landscapes of transition – each bearing the intertwining, hallmarks of their times. A collage of images, sounds, letters, diaries, notes, voices, fragments of time and space.
Thomas Heise was born in 1955 in Berlin. After graduating from the Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg, he acquired his MA at the Berlin Academy of Fine Art. Since 1983 he has worked as a freelance writer and director in the areas of theatre, audio drama and documentary. However, until the end of the GDR all his documentary efforts were either blocked, destroyed or confiscated.
He was a member of the Berlin Ensemble until 1997, where he acted as contributing director for a number of productions. He was teaching as a Professor for Film and Media Art at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design from 2007 to 2013. Since 2013, he has been working as a Professor for Art and Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Since 2018, he has been the director of the Film and Media Arts section at the Academy of Arts Berlin Brandenburg, Germany.
The House (1984), People’s Police (1985), Iron Age (1991), Barluschke (1997), My Local (2000), Fatherland (2002), Lucky (Niggers) (2006), Children. As Time Flies (2008), Material (2009), Solar System (2011), Condition (2012), Consequence (2012), Heimat is a Space in Time (2019)