Thomas Heise

In Bettina Büttner’s exquisitely lucid documentary Kinder (Kids), childhood dysfunction, loneliness, and pent-up emotion run wild at an all-boys group home in southern Germany. The children interned here include ten-year-olds Marvin and Tommy. Marvin, fiddling with a mini plastic Lego sword, explains matter-of-factly to the camera, “This is a knife. You use it to cut stomachs open.” Dennis, who is even younger, is seen in a hysteric fit, mimicking some pornographic scene. Boys will be boys, but innocence is disproportionately spare here. Choosing not to dwell on the harsh specifics, Büttner reveals the disconcerting manner in which traumatic episodes can manifest themselves in the mundane — a game of Lego, Hide and Seek, or Truth or Dare. Filmed in lapidary black-and-white, Büttner’s fascinating film sheds light on childhood from the boys’ characteristically disadvantaged perspective — one not yet fully cognizant — leaving much ethically to ponder over.

Documentary by Thomas Heise filmed in East Berlin in 1987/88.

The lower level of Lichtenberg Station in Belin in early October 1989: the beginning of the end for the GDR. In the snack bar, the staff are catering for travellers of every kind while in the background the authorities maintain a flow of triumphal statements, but those months between August and October come to feel like sitting out the death throes. Careful observation of people and their work as the current of history suddenly becomes perceptible.

"Pictures from the late eighties in the GDR on up to the immediate present in the year 2008 in Germany. What has been left over besieges my mind. All these pictures keep reassembling themselves to make up something which they were originally not made for. They are still in motion. They are becoming history." (Thomas Heise)

CONSEQUENCE tracks the tiring working day between Christmas Eve and New Year at a small German crematorium operating 24/7.

Ten years after breaking off the film "Anka and ..." nearly all the protagonists of that time have disappeared. Mario and Tilo hung themselves in the final phase of the GDR, Frank is surviving in West Berlin addicted to drugs, and Karsten is doing pretty well there. Anka, however, who once was in love with each of them, lives alone with her danghter in Eisenhüttenstadt. A film about normality in life.

"This was my first student documentary. I shot it over the Easter vacation in 1980 on 16mm, black-and-white reversal film. Apart from two five-minute exercises, it was destined to be the only film I ever finished at the College of Film and Television of the German Democratic Republic (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR, HFF) in East Germany’s Potsdam-Babelsberg. It was quickly banned from being shown publicly and it remained in storage until the end of 1989. The film tells the story of a mother and her sons having coffee and cake while they try to remember –in vain– when the first time was that they tangled with the police. The reason it was banned was the casual way the film portrayed those young men living their lives untouched by ideology, including taking their careers as petty criminals for granted, meaning the film’s author accepted their existence, as is, and simply wanted to explore it.”

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.