Films by Eva C. Heldmann

Germany 2024, 73 min
by Eva C. Heldmann

Free-floating yet rigorously structured, this essay film presents botanist and educationalist Catharina Helena Dörrien and her time in Orange-Nassau in the 18th century. Via regulations and floral formulas, nature philosophy and social policy converge. [74 BERLINALE – Forum]

Germany 2017, 27 min
by Eva C. Heldmann

Dennis and I live together. One year ago I started to explore his 30.8 square meters with my camera. This portrait of a man in his workroom emerged.Papers cover the floor, mixed up - a lot of contradictory details. In between noted thoughts, mathematical formulas, graphic sketches, and receipts, there are novels, scientific books, issues of the New York Review, tools, lenses, pieces of wood, cardboards, plastic bags, and dust..On the one hand things appear as mysterious chaos of details. On the other hand a self-willed world becomes visible: the world of a mathematician, of a thinker, art historian and a handyman. He believes the two kinds of work, handcraft and intellectual, support each other.Dennis spent a half year working on a small geometric surprise inside Dürer's "Hieronymus im Gehäus", and confessed: "Jerome's room is my room". How does he see that?The camera tracks down the details in the room. I don't really trust his work methods -- little gets done -- but they drew me in, affecting my own method in this film. Filmmaker and subject play their cat-and-mouse game.

2015, 79 min
by Eva C. Heldmann

The film interviews five people who cannot pay their electricity bills. They live below the poverty line without light and heat, in or near large cities. Berlin based artist Laurence Grave acts a composite rôle, representing aspects of the other people. She sees, hears and touches in her forsaken apartment, and feels limited and excluded. At the same time she is extra-sensitive to the passage of light, day and night, through her windows. A long indoor twilight persists between the bright sunlight and the night car lights that both shine onto her walls making 'cinema'. The sounds that creep into the apartment are just alien to her. The interviewed people read their responses for the camera. (This technique relaxes the original interview and also gives the people some interpretative distance from themselves.) They speak of how they lost work, then electricity, then hope, and finally found clever solutions to their precarious situations.In the end the actress rises from her dark world to dizzy heights, flashing with her own electricity, remaking the rules of the game. "Elektra" triumphs! A film about light and darkness, noise and silence, belonging and being excluded, reality and show/chaos.