Thomas Heise‘s final film, “Übergang,” arrives at the Locarno Film Festival as both a portrait of one of Germany’s most influential documentary filmmakers and the completion of a project left unfinished by his death.
Premiering in the festival’s out of competition section, the film traces Heise’s life through newly shot footage, archival material and photographs, sewing together a meditation on time and transition.
Heise, whose body of work chronicled the lives of ordinary people across East Germany during reunification and the decades that followed, began developing “Übergang” as a portrait of Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee before his death in 2024. Longtime collaborators Peter Badel and Chris Wright ultimately completed the documentary, shaping a film that explores the filmmaker’s life and enduring relationship with German history.
Produced by Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion, “Übergang” at once imports you to Schönhauser Allee through patient, black and white street-level scenes of normal life: commuters boarding a tram, quiet revelers at a carnival, a couple in conversation. Voice over paints the picture of the man behind the camera, and through carefully placed interview vignettes of Heise, the observer becomes the observed. “Übergang” draws together contemporary observations set against Heise’s experiences growing up in East Berlin to shed light on the political and social transformations that defined both his life and art.
