An unprecedented cinematic achievement and powerful historical essay, Heimat is a Space in Time pieces together excerpts from the biography of an Austro-Hungarian family that gradually disintegrated from the late 1800s into the 20th century. Thomas Heise, a leading German documentarist, uses material from his personal archive – letters, photographs, diaries – to weave together the story of his family over four generations. We see the present places and landscapes mentioned in letters, with all the signs of time gone by, as the film floats between first love and lost luck, fathers, mothers, sons, brothers, affairs, hurt, and joy. Using fragments from his repository of personal experience, meticulously chosen and assembled, Heise tells nothing less than the story of Germany in the 20th century.