Films by Heino Deckert

Germany, France 2024, 98 min
by Victor Kossakovsky

From filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky (Gunda, Aquarela) comes an epic, intimate and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward.Centering on a landscape project by the Italian architect Michele de Lucci, Kossakovsky uses the circle to reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing breathtaking imagery from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, dating back to AD 60, to the recent destruction of cities in Turkey following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023.Rocks and stone connect the disparate societies, from ghostly monoliths stuck in the earth to tragic heaps of concrete rubble waiting to be hauled off and repurposed anew. Through Kossakovsky’s inquisitive lens, the grandeur and folly of humanity and its precarious relationship with nature posits the urgent question: How do we build, and how can we build better, before it’s too late?With: Michele de Lucchi, Mauro Mella, Davide Alioli, Nick Steur, Abdul Nabi Al-Afi

France, Senegal, Germany 2022, 105 min
by Alassane Diago

Forty protagonists, witnesses and victims look back at the 1989 massacres on both sides of the Senegal River, the border between Mauritania and Senegal, in order to understand what really happened, and try to take a step towards reconciliation together. [Semaine de la critique – 75 Locarno FF]"In 1989, after a clash near the border between Mauritanian shepherds and Senegalese peasants, an incredible escalation of racist violence took place in the two countries. These events caused thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. Today, despite appearances, the wounds have not healed. With this film, I want to try to understand what really happened, I want to pay tribute to the dead, and above all, I want to take a step towards reconciliation." Alassane Diago

Germany 2021, 111 min
by Chris Wright, Stefan Kolbe

The filmmakers first meet Stefan in 2015, in the therapy ward of Brandenburg Prison. Their first impression is of a polite, shy man. A warder tells them Stefan is an ice-cold woman-killer.The filmmakers follow him through the last years of his prison term. They face some uncomfortable questions. Can anyone really know what is going on inside this man? The part of the protagonist is taken by a puppet, the scenes shift into theatre. Truth and falsehood blend in a cascade of presumption.

Switzerland, Germany 2021, 110 min
by Heidi Specogna

Nardos, an Azmari singer from Addis Ababa, dreams of telling stories about the lives of ordinary people through her music. In her search of stories for her songs, she meets Gennet, a poet who lives on the streets with her children. As Nardos puts the lives of Ethiopian women, their visions and power at the centre of her creation, we dive deeper and deeper into a rapidly changing country.

Germany, Austria 2019, 218 min
by Thomas Heise

The film picks up the biographical pieces of a family torn apart through the end of the 19th and into the 20th century.The used material is what remained of Thomas Heise’s family.It is about people who by chance found each other, only then to lose each other.Now it is their descendants, their children and grandchildren who are beginning to disappear.Fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, the affairs, the hurt and the joy in landscapes of transition – each bearing the intertwining, hallmarks of their times. A collage of images, sounds, letters, diaries, notes, voices, fragments of time and space.

Germany 2019, 84 min
by Aysun Bademsoy

The National Socialist Underground murders in the early 2000s left scars. Not only among the relatives of the victims, but also in the migrant communities and the entire German society.TRACES follows these scars and poses the question of whether such injuries can ever heal completely.“Between September 2000 and April 2007, nine immigrant businessmen and a German policewoman were murdered. (…) I read the news about the murders and thought: That could have been my father or my brother.” We’re talking about the murders of the self-proclaimed National Socialist Underground (NSU) which came to light through the main perpetrators’ suicide. After the end of the five-year NSU trial against their co-perpetrators and supporters, filmmaker Aysun Bademsoy goes in search of the traces left by this crime series: in the victims’ families and migrant communities, where the investigators had first investigated exclusively and sowed deep mistrust with speculations of drug trafficking and the Mafia, not least with assignations like “Kebap Murders”. “The NSU murdered my father. The investigators stained his honour. In doing so, they killed him a second time,” a surviving daughter says after the – to her disappointing – judgement was pronounced. Confidence in the German state was deeply shaken and the trial, a sobering experience for all families which left many things in the dark, destroyed rather than restored it. A film about surviving – despite everything.(DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)

Germany, Switzerland, Finland 2018, 90 min
by Anja Kofmel

Croatia, January 1992. In the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, Chris, a young Swiss journalist is found dead in mysterious circumstances. He was wearing the uniform of an international mercenary group. Anja Kofmel was his cousin. As a little girl, she used to admire this handsome young man; now a grown-up woman, she decides to investigate his story, trying to understand what really was the involvement of Chris in the conflict…With: Megan Gay, Joel Basman, Michael Würtenberg, Veronika Schwab, Carlos Ilich, Ramirez Sanchez, Sinisa Juricic, Heidi Rinke, Julio Cesar Alonso, Alejandro Hernandez Mora

Germany, Denmark, Great Britain 2018, 90 min
by Victor Kossakovsky

AQUARELA takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water. Filmed at a rare 96 frames-per-second for 96 frames-per-second projection, the film is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth’s most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela’s mighty Angels Falls, water is AQUARELA’S main character, with director Victor Kossakovsky capturing her many personalities in startling visual detail. A documentary by Victor Kossakowsky. Produced by Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktions GmbH, Aconite Productions Ltd. and Danish Documentary. In co-production with Louverture Films and RBB in association with arte, Cactus World Films, Rio Negro Produccione and Ánorâk Film. Supported by Mitteldeutscher Medienförderung, Creative Scotland, British Film Institute, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, DFFF, Danish Film Institute, The Government of Greenland. Developement supported by Eurimages, Sundance Documentary Fund and Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund.

Germany 2018, 72 min
by Andreas Goldstein

My father Klaus Gysi - Jew and communist - made his career in the former GDR after years of illegality in Nazi Germany. The fall of socialism burnt his life efforts in one brief moment. The film THE COMMUNIST tries to reflect on his failure from the viewpoint of my own experiences within this historical time. My fundamental historical experience is opportunism. 1990 people already forgot what they believed in the year before. So did my father, one of the leading operatives of the GDR, who now calls the state he worked for all his life a dictatorship which should have been prevented. A sudden change of heart which disturbed me and was the reason to make this movie.

2017, 140 min
by Ai Weiwei

For the last two years, Ai Wei Wei has lived outside China as an involuntary emigré. The people that he met on a year-long journey through 23 countries aren't prominent dissidents or artists. They have fled war and misery, through jungle, over mountains and across seas. Ai Weiwei has been to Kenya and Iraq, Gaza and Italy, to refugee centres in Berlin and Greek beaches and talked to people who left everything behind. In haunting pictures, he gives space to the hopes, privations and fears of his protagonists, who represent the 65 million displaced people in the world today. (FILMFEST HAMBURG)

Germany 2014, 69 min
by Hazem Alhamwi

How can you keep your humanity in a dictatorship where you’re educated to erase in yourself any singularity? In his early years, the Syrian painter and filmmaker Hazem Alhamwi found his own way to live and to feel free, drawing obsessively in his own room. But in 2011, finally, the Revolution started. The Syrian people went out in the streets, facing Al-Assad’s army. Hazem Alhamwi found himself unable to face his terror immediately. How could he stay paralyzed in such an important moment in his destiny? Going back to his remote memories, from his childhood to nowadays, Hazem Alhamwi tells a culture of fear and the will of freedom of a whole country.

Germany, Romania 2010, 93 min
by Dr. Titus Faschina

Dumitru Stanciu is one of the last mountain shepherds ofEurope. As his forefathers did for thousands of years, in summeras in winter he and his herd of sheep roam the far reachesof the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains, close to the edge of heaven. Vivid histories and fantastic myths, far from the world of today, cinematically narrated over the course of a year. The last refugein Europe for a forgotten profession in an unhurried world.with: Dumitru Stanciu, Radu Stanciu, Maria Stanciu

Germany 2009, 166 min
by Thomas Heise

Something always remains, a rest, that cannot be subsumed. (From EISENZEIT 1991) The Film MATERIAL contains observations, scenes, fragments, stories and processes. Images from the late eighties in the GDR to the immediate present of the year 2008 in Germany. The montage of these images creates a picture of these times, where past, present and future mirror one another. It is my picture. In 1987 author Heiner Müller brought me a video camera back from West Berlin and I began using it to record images. Observations from the theatre and small scenes from the everyday reality of a disappearing state. Early 1990 this state was finished, all tapes were full and the camera was broken. Other cameras have sporadically taken its place. A Super 8, a 16mm and a 35mm camera, a DigiBetacam, and a DV-camera. The images from these cameras were produced to the left and to the right of the films I have made since then. Some of these excursions became part of these films, while others were never used. Ever since, those leftover images have besieged my head, constantly reassembling themselves into new shapes that are further and further removed from their original meaning and function. They remain in motion. They become history; they become a story. Now is the time to tell it. This film is not a polished end product; it is told from a very personal point of view. It shows what I saw, what caught my attention and what I held on to. It tells the story of a lot of people that start talking for the first time. And often only for that one time, after a long period of waiting and silence. A rare and often unexpected moment. Like a short awakening. I become aware that I am one of those people.original German version with English subtitles available

Germany 2009
by Boris Hars-Tschachotin

Charismatic, erratic, egocentric, almost forgotten… Sergej Tschachotin was a scientist of international repute, friend to Pavlov and Einstein, revolutionary and pacifist. His private life was changeful too: five marriages, eight sons. SERGEJ IN THE URN tells the story of Sergej Tschachotin’s epic existence - from 1883 to 1973 - through the memories of four of his sons. Speaking openly for the first time, they tell of Tschachotin’s role as a cancer researcher, his participation in anti-totalitarian propaganda movements, and his crusade against the arms race. But each son also exposes his conflicted relationship with a colossal fatherly shadow. Filmmaker Boris Hars-Tschachotin, Sergej’s great-grandson, weaves together an intimate, tortured family saga that mirrors the myriad contradictions and possibilities of the 20th century. Seeking resolution, he attempts to reunite his scattered family in a small Corsican village to bury the ashes contained in Sergej’s urn. This story, however, like the painful period from Russian Revolution to the beginning of the 21st century it describes, could ultimately split apart. original German/French/Russian version with German narrator and English or German subtitles

Germany 2008, 90 min
by Qaushiq Mukherjee

India is the birthplace of love. There’s nowhere else in the world where so much is dedicated to the idolizing and immortalizing of the concept of romance. India was one of the first civilizations to recognize the human need for love and give cultural expression to that, in poems, pictures and monuments. LOVE IN INDIA looks at how the concept of love has evolved and changed over the centuries. From the Kama Sutra to Shak Rukh Khan’s Bollywood movies, the viewer is treated to a voyage of discovery looking into love’s promises and deceptions right up to the modern day.original Hindi version with English subtitles available