The Academy mourns the death of Thomas Heise (1955-2024)
From 2013 to 2022, Thomas Heise was Professor of Art and Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Documentary film director Thomas Heise, born into an academic family in East Berlin in 1955, was initially an assistant director at Defa in the 1970s. After graduating from high school, he studied at the film school in Babelsberg, where he was expelled for political reasons in 1983. During the GDR and after reunification, Heise made numerous documentaries about the reality of life in East Germany. Thomas Heise was admitted to the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2001. Since 2018, he has been director of the Film and Media Art section there. From 2013 to 2022, Univ.-Prof. Thomas Heise was Professor of Art and Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He was also a long-time member of the Senate there.
As a chronicler of the German-German upheavals, Heise became a voice that was also widely respected internationally and won numerous awards, including the main prize from DokLeipzig three times. In 2019, he was awarded the German Documentary Film Prize, among other prizes, for his last film, the essayistic study "Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit". In the film, he uses letters from his grandfather, the literary scholar Wilhelm Heise, and his parents Rosemarie Heise and Wolfgang Heise - she was a Germanist, he a philosophy professor in the GDR - to create a family history and at the same time a history of divided Germany in the 20th century.
Thomas Heise died on Wednesday at the age of 68 in Berlin.
(APA, red, May 30, 2024)