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“Everything should carry on as before. Including the film shoot.” This was the instruction given by Thomas Heise, shortly before his death in May 2024, to his long-standing collaborators, the cinematographer Peter Badel and the producer Heino Deckert.

Still aus Übergang von Peter Badel und Chris Wright

Just before that, they had begun working together on Heise’s final project: a film about his city, Berlin, and the key stages of his life.

After just a few days of filming, the director succumbed to a brief but serious illness. Naturally, things cannot carry on as before.

Peter Badel and editor Chris Wright set out together to find a way to carry on Heise’s idea whilst remaining true to his radical aesthetic approach. Alongside observations on Schönhauser Allee and numerous conversations with friends and colleagues, extensive research into Heise’s estate and various archives gives rise to a tentative conceptual framework – a film for Thomas Heise.

Previously unpublished texts, diary entries, photographs and film sequences are assembled in a fragmentary manner and placed in dialogue with the present. The result is a portrait of a precise, provocative observer, transcending German forms of government and contemporary history. Heise comments: “Documentary film outlasts the state in which it is made.”