Thomas Heise is dead. His final film, Übergang — a German word that means transition, passage, crossing — is not. It sits here, at Locarno, like a letter that arrived after the sender's gone. You open it, and his voice is still warm.
Heise, who died in 2024, left behind a body of work that treated the documentary not as a window but as a mirror held up to Germany's fractured soul. Übergang, premiering out of competition, was his last puzzle. And he didn't finish it. Someone else had to. That someone is his longtime collaborator, who assembled the fragments into a whole that feels less like a film and more like a séance.
This isn't a review. It's a reckoning with what it means to watch a dying man's art.
The Ghost in the Machine
The film opens not with a title card but with a train. Of course it does. Heise loved trains — the way they carry people across borders, the way they mark time, the way they leave stations that no longer exist. The image is grainy, shot on 16mm, the kind of celluloid that feels like memory. You can almost smell the dust.
But here's the thing: the train is not moving. It's a still frame, held for an uncomfortably long time. Then, a voice — Heise's own, recorded months before his death — says, "Time is not a line. It's a knot." That's the whole thesis. The film never unties the knot. It just pulls at different strands, letting them dangle.
There are no talking heads here. No experts. No one to tell you what to think. Instead, Heise gives us what he always gave: the raw texture of lives lived in the margins. A woman in Berlin who remembers the Wall as if it were a lover. A man in Leipzig whose factory job vanished along with the GDR. Children in a schoolyard, playing a game whose rules no one remembers.
It's the kind of documentary that makes you uncomfortable because it refuses to explain itself. You're not watching a story. You're watching time itself, leaking through the cracks.
The Unfinished Symphony
Here's where it gets complicated. Heise died before he could edit Übergang. His collaborator, Philipp Gsteiger, took the raw footage — hours of it, some of it shot decades ago — and shaped it into the 98-minute film that's now confounding and enchanting Locarno audiences.
Did Gsteiger betray Heise's vision? Only if you believe a dead man's vision is a fixed thing. Gsteiger told me, in a hushed voice over espresso, that he felt like a medium, not an editor. "I wasn't making decisions. I was listening."
You can feel that hesitation in the film's rhythm. There are moments where the edit lingers a beat too long, where a shot of a window stays up past its welcome. It's as if Gsteiger is waiting for Heise to say, "Cut." He never does. So the film breathes the way a body breathes just before death — slow, deliberate, final.
That's not a flaw. That's the point. Übergang is a film about unfinished business, and it is itself unfinished business. It's the rare documentary that doesn't just depict its subject — it embodies it.
Why Locarno Matters
Locarno is the right place for this film. It's a festival that prizes the avant-garde, the difficult, the films that make you walk out and then come back because you can't stop thinking about them. Übergang is that kind of movie. It's not a crowd-pleaser. It's a puzzle-box.
But here's what's striking: despite its opacity, it connects. At the screening I attended, there was a strange silence when the credits rolled. Not the polite applause of a festival crowd, but a collective holding of breath. Then, slowly, people started talking — to strangers, to themselves. That's Heise's gift. He made you feel, even when you couldn't fully understand.
"Time is not a line. It's a knot." — Thomas Heise, in Übergang
The film's title, Übergang, also refers to the transition between life and death. Heise knew he was dying. The film is his way of saying goodbye — not to his family, not to his friends, but to his country, Germany, a nation he spent his entire career dissecting with a scalpel that was sometimes loving, sometimes cruel.
He shows us a Germany that no longer exists: the divided one, the paranoid one, the one that built walls and then tore them down. But he also shows us the Germany that exists now, in the faces of refugees who arrive at stations that used to be checkpoints. The knot tightens.
A Master's Last Lesson
I've seen all of Heise's major works. The Fatherland, Material, Stunde Null — each one a testament to his belief that cinema could be a form of historical consciousness. But Übergang tops them all, because it's not about history. It's about what history does to the people who live through it.
There's a scene near the end that destroyed me. It's a long take of Heise's own hand, writing in a notebook. We never see his face. We just see the pen moving, sometimes fast, sometimes pausing, as if the thought is too heavy to write down. The last line he writes, and the film's final image, is a single word: "Weiter." Continue. Go on.
That's Heise's final directive. To cinema, to Germany, to us. Keep going, even when the person who showed you the way is gone.
Is Übergang a masterpiece? I don't know. Masterpieces are for people who are certain. This film is for people who are not. It's for those who understand that endings are just transitions in disguise, and that the dead speak loudest when we stop trying to hear them.
Go see it. But be warned: you won't leave the theater. You'll carry it with you, a knot that won't come undone.
