Looking down from the sky. Moving over an area with houses accompanied by the director’s voice telling the viewer that this is my place, a kind of brief prologue in a melancholic maybe nostalgic tone. Existential questions raised. And then down to earth, to a smiling happy boy on bike, driving around a town with glimpses of happy gatherings, old women dancing, and driven by lovely energetic music by Evgenyi Kadimsky. It’s a dynamic optimistic start.

The title: ”The simple present tense is when you use a verb (here a film, ed.) to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month. We use the simple present tense for anything that happens often or is factual.”

… explanation for a complicated English title chosen by Russian director Dmitry Kabakov. I met him in Riga a month ago and he sent me a link to this new film by him. Thank you for that, I enjoyed it. Because of the director’s good documentary eye for situations and details in everyday life in his Zvavoronki, where he has lived since he was three years old. Because he takes his time, let scenes stand long and because he has a position:

Fences are built in his town. Around houses, at the railway, at the roads. Borders that separate. Trains that pass by, only some stop. Political refugees from Tajikistan, they don’t speak Russian, meeting slogans on the walls like ”Russia for Russians”. The director takes a lot of time to give a historical background of Tajikistan. Not necessary, what is interesting is the fate of the characters of today.  

It’s a big family that is in focus with the boy on the bike, Mukhammad, as the one to be followed from, when he goes with his father “to pick up” a new baby, sibling number 7 and his mother at the hospital till you see him as a fence builder after his Tadjik family has been forced to move away from the house that they had been allowed to stay in by the church in the town.

Between the boy on the bike and the same older boy doing fences you find the film. Next door to the house of the Tadjik family is the green house, where an old couple live. The woman is a teacher and invites in Mukhammad and his sister to be taught languages and mathematics. She is lovely. A strong woman. Her talks with her mostly silent husband are most often about the living conditions of the refugees, she has a true humanistic approach to life and people. The camera catches, no I would say caresses the couple, when they are inside and when they sit on a bench in the garden.

The couple is the director’s parents, he reveals towards the end of the film, you sense that in the tone of the film and in sequences… the father – he does that often – sits in his own thoughts for some time, gets up to take something from the wife’s place in the garden and walks towards the door to the house. Slowly.

The title, “The simple present tense”, is used to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month… that’s what the film does in a very fine way.

Russia/Latvia, 2019, 91 mins.

Colleague Allan Berg tells me that if he loves a book, when finished he often starts reading it again immediately. My mentor Niels Jensen (who died in 2010) said the same: I often, if I love a film, leaves the cinema and walks in again to have a ticket for the next screening. Jensen, who also left a screening if he found the film boring and/or without quality… Why stay till the end?

I would have loved  to watch Thomas Heise’s film essay again right away. But I will wait for the second screening to be on a big screen, in a cinema, if not before (DOK Leipzig?) then at IDFA in Amsterdam. I want the full cinema screen with its image and sound as it was thought from the director’s side.

There is so much I want to (re)discover, so many cinematic decisions that are far from main-stream documentary storytelling.

With the whole overall ambition, to take the viewer through the history of a family, through generations from the beginning of the 20th century till today. What an ambition and what an original and succesful result!

Like a written biography it is a film in 5 chapters, indeed a piece of literature

in itself as much as it is an aesthetically balanced visual interpretation with the voice of the director reading letters, diaries, presenting documents, and let me not forget the muted tone, never pushy, never overwhelming, but always there in the background together with the eloquent voiceover.

I want to point at some of the sequences in the 1st chapter of the film – the chapter lasts one hour. Masterly montaged sequences.

The first chapter that is world history (the first WW) seen by Wilhelm Heise, the grandfather of the director, who writes as a young man about War:    

„Hand in hand with the spiritual degeneration comes the decline in ethic and morals“ … slowly emerges a photo of three soldiers posing for the camera… “Man‘s bestial nature celebrates its highest triumphs…“

Read by Thomas Heise with his voice that captures your attention here and through the film because of its kind-of-neutral character, even when the most terrible events are coming up, it stays like this – the effect is emotional strong.

But this first chapter is also a love story… between Wilhelm Heise, who lives in Berlin and Edith Hirschorn, whose family lives in Vienna. The letters are beautiful, read by Heise, while you look through a rainy window of a tram of today’s Vienna, hearing in between the automatic voice of „next station“! And hear some passenger voices and the tram’s rail music…

Edith writes a recipe. „Give it to your mother”.

And while Edith is back in Vienna, Wilhelm writes: „Just come and things will be different… in recent days I’ve been imagining this: I am sitting on the balcony and reading. Sometimes I look up. You sit at the other end of the balcony. Sometimes you also look up. We look at each other and smile…”. Yes, that’s how love is. Also in my sitting room today.

B/W images of today accompanying: U-Bahn in Berlin, a young couple hugs each other – Heise reads a letter from Max and Anna Hirschorn in Vienna telling Dr. Wilhelm Heise that they would welcome him in Vienna to become their son-in-law, the wife of their daughter Edith. (The U-Bahn scene also a ”first love scene” as the director remembers it? The film has many layers).

The sound of trains, the image of flowers in the foreground and train passing in the background, family photos of the couple with two children, Hans and Wolf(gang).

Back to historical documents, names written, Jews on lists for deportation, Heise reads the correspondance between Vienna and Berlin. ”Vater und Opa” Max Hirschhorn writes, so does Edith’s sister Elsa, about daily things, hard days and about the transport to Poland that becomes more and more actual. ”Why do we have to live in these times”. Where the Jews are not allowed to ride buses, can not get good tobacco any longer (Max complains about this), where certain areas are not good to stay in.

Montaged with around 20 minutes visual documentation – nazi deportation lists with Heise reading the correspondance. You read all these Jewish last names, you have met them on other occasions, it becomes painful as you know the fate waiting for them.  

From an aunt: “July 23. Dear Edith. Thank you for everything. Best regards to you all. Farewell. I’m travelling today. Pepita» – and you read the name on the document underligned with red: Finkel Perl Josefine Sara, 2 Körnerg. 7/15, 13.10.76, the latter her date of birth.

«Travelling today» – as the other members of Edith’s family «to Poland».

Cut to (the lyrics of) a popular song, performed by Marika Rökk during Nazi time, «Don’t look here, don’t look there – Just look straight ahead – And whatever may come – Just never mind». Sarchasm, Irony from the side of the director?

Leaving the deportation lists… long black break before Heise comes back with the personal resumé of Wolfgang Heise, the son of Wilhelm and Edith, who is a Wehrmacht soldier, like his brother Hans, writing from a barrack during the last years of the war. Words to the parents in Berlin – hope all is well.

Montaged with images from today in Eastern Germany: empty houses, forgotten nature if that is the right wording, everything is left behind, left overs, sad images, no hope and windmills that continue to move slowly, the flow of history as Wolfgang Heise mentions, not to stop.

Some steps into the first chapter, I will do the same later with the fifth chapter of this magnificent documentary reflection of a space in time.   

HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME picks up the biographical pieces of a family torn apart through the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. 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.

This is all about speaking and silence. First love and happiness lost. 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.

HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME is a journey of reflection of time and the love held within using sounds, images and language. Yet some of it shall remain forever lost. The material used in this film is what remains of my family. The remnants of those I knew, whose circumstances I had been part of or had otherwise experienced. Remnants that mirror history. A history that is just as much my own. (Thomas Heise)

Germany, 2018, 218 mins.

Waad al-Kateab, director and the woman behind the camera, the one who filmed and produced this film, puts a question to a nurse, who sits alone in the hospital in Aleppo. What’s wrong? After a while he responds: Children have nothing to do with this! He does so a bit into a heartbreaking documentary from hell on earth, Aleppo 2016, where child after child are being rushed in to be treated after they have been hit by bombs during the siege of the city. Many of them are dead. What did children have to do with these massacres? Nothing of course. Two brothers follow their dead third brother, with despair in their eyes. Their mother arrives. Another mother shouts to her dead child “I have milk for you”. Turning around to the camera “film, film this”.

Waad al-Kateab’s husband, the doctor Hamza – what a man, one of many heroes who help the injured 24/7 – worked in one hospital that was bombed, they move and find another place to set up a hospital, in constant danger. I dream red, Waad al-Kateab, says at some point – the images show blood being swept away from the floor. Doctor Hamza is reporting to the media, Waad is a journalist, who has been sending news to Channel4. They fall in love, get married and Sama is born, to whom the mother adresses her love and hope, an intelligent storytelling solution. As a viewer you are with the little girl and her parents hoping the best for her, even if “you Sama never cries like a child normally does”. And the camera follows another family as well, where a boy does not want to leave Aleppo at the same time as he talks about the many friends, who are not there any longer. The word is kliché… but the film is full of fine poetic moments that communicate “we want to survive” and of course “we want to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad”.

“We won’t make it”, says Doctor Hamza, the father, “the regime is only one street away”. But they do get away with the last convoy out of Aleppo after a phone call to the Doctor from a UN representative, who conveys to them “the offer” from the Russians that they can leave Aleppo. They have no choice, Waad al-Kateab is pregnant again, “our future is no longer in our hands”, “saying goodbye is worth than death”, for once you see Doctor Hamza in tears, you understand why having watched an extraordinarily strong film that jumps in time to balance the dark and the light, to make the film bearable to watch one could also say. How much horror can a viewer cope with?

The film has already received 20 awards and has just been released in the UK. Below there is a link to a fine interview with the two directors and the Doctor. In this the latter mentions that what we experienced in Aleppo is now being repeated in Idlib. “The world is just ignoring us”, “where did we go wrong”!  

USA/UK, 2019, 95 mins.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/25/for-sama-documentary-interview-waad-al-kateab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmULjz1e6U

https://www.forsamafilm.com/