There’s something hauntingly poetic about a film that’s both a eulogy and a manifesto. Thomas Heise’s Übergang, premiering at Locarno, isn’t just a documentary about a filmmaker—it’s a mirror held up to the contradictions of modern Germany, and by extension, the world. What makes this particularly fascinating is how it turns the act of remembering into a political act. Heise, who died in 2024, left behind a project that felt unfinished, like a conversation cut short mid-sentence. But the collaborators who completed it—Peter Badel and Chris Wright—didn’t just fill in the blanks. They turned the gaps into a deliberate aesthetic, a reminder that absence can be as powerful as presence. Personally, I think this speaks to a deeper truth: that the most resonant art often emerges from unresolved questions, not tidy conclusions.
The film’s focus on Schönhauser Allee—a Berlin transit hub—feels like a metaphor for our collective state of flux. Here, commuters, revelers, and the forgotten coexist in a space that’s both a crossroads and a void. Heise’s lens, even in death, captures the mundane with a kind of sacred attention. A couple in conversation, a tram pulling away—these aren’t just scenes; they’re fragments of a larger narrative about how societies evolve (or devolve). What many people don’t realize is that Heise’s work was never about grand gestures. He found the epic in the everyday, which is why Übergang feels so urgent now. In an age where we’re constantly told to ‘move on’ from history, his insistence on lingering over the overlooked is a radical act of resistance.
One thing that immediately stands out is how the film treats Heise himself as a character, not a god. The voiceovers, the interviews, the archival material—all of it paints him as a man grappling with the same existential questions as his subjects. This raises a deeper question: Who gets to be remembered, and who gets erased? Heise’s archive, curated by his husband Michael, becomes a kind of time capsule, but it’s not a static relic. It’s alive, breathing through the collaborators’ choices. A detail that I find especially interesting is how the film avoids explaining where its materials come from. Instead, it lets the fragments converse, creating a mosaic that feels less like a biography and more like a living argument about memory and meaning.
The final scene, with Michael—the homeless man who becomes the film’s unwitting narrator—is a masterstroke. It’s not just a moment of poignancy; it’s a structural rebellion. By letting a marginalized figure deliver the closing lines, Heise’s collaborators reject the notion that history belongs to the powerful. This isn’t just about documenting a life; it’s about redefining who gets to speak in the archive. If you take a step back and think about it, this aligns with a broader trend in contemporary documentary filmmaking: the rejection of authorship as a singular, authoritative voice. Heise’s legacy here is that he didn’t just film history—he invited it to speak back.
What this really suggests is that Übergang is more than a tribute. It’s a challenge to audiences to see the present as a continuation of the past, not a rupture. The film’s meditation on transition—from East Germany to the present day, from Heise’s life to his death—forces us to confront how easily we forget. In my opinion, this is the most important takeaway: that the lessons of two world wars, of division and reunification, are not just historical footnotes. They’re warnings. And in a world increasingly defined by war and rearmament, Heise’s work is a call to remember. Because as he once said, ‘Things can easily change for the worse, and you won’t notice until it’s too late.’ That line doesn’t just haunt the film—it haunts us all.
