[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

On New Year’s Eve 2024, Thomas Heise, restless chronicler of post-war German history, embarked on a new project centred on Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee, his home for decades. Tragically, the writer, theatre director, and documentarian passed away suddenly a few months later, aged 68. His crew, chiefly cinematographer Peter Badel and editor Chris Wright, continued shooting, supplementing their existing material with texts, photographs, film clips, and televised interviews from the filmmaker’s estate and other archives.

Übergang, “a film for Thomas Heise”, is a polyphonic object, a collective portrait of Heise as seen by his friends and collaborators. This mosaic-like structure offers a non-linear survey of the filmmaker’s life and work, one that also accommodates moments of dissonance – for instance, describing Heise’s youth at the Babelsberg University in East Germany, Badel reads out the Stasi surveillance file on the allegedly subversive student. Shortly after, a friend, a woman simply named Pit, cautions against taking the Stasi report at face value.

The most important voice, however, is that of Heise himself. He appears in photographs and interviews, and discusses the lives of his closest family members in voiceover. Through letters, we learn about his childhood, military service, romantic life, approach to artmaking, and his estrangement from his half-Jewish father, once a detainee in a Nazi labour camp. Heise also talks about the fleeting period of absolute freedom that he experienced during die Wende of 1989–1990.

These biographical details are intercut with street scenes from the Schönhauser Allee: interviews and silent portraits of New Year’s revellers, football fanatics, and homeless individuals hanging around the station. These vignettes seem out of context at first glance. But placed against accounts of Heise’s politicised youth in East Berlin, they acquire a historical dimension, suggesting the transmutation of collective energies under the sway of capital – the first signs of which the filmmaker witnessed in the reunified city’s anti-squatting operations in 1990.

For decades, Heise’s films brought the past, present, and future into fertile dialogue, capturing the glacial flow of history and its many ironies. Übergang honours this worldview in juxtaposing, for example, footage of East Berlin protests against impenetrable borders with contemporary rallies in the city against so-called “open borders”. In doing so, the film turns Heise’s own life into a repository of Berlin’s rich history. Shortly before his death, in 2024, Heise headed the Berlinale jury that awarded No Other Land the top documentary prize – an event that resulted in threats from German cultural authorities. Memorably, in his last media interview, Heise responded to that instance of state overreach: “Sorry, but that’s pure GDR; I’ve heard all that before.”