Thomas Heise's last documentary, Übergang, premieres out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival — a film its director did not live to finish.

Heise, one of Germany's most distinctive documentary film-makers, died in 2024, months after he began developing the project as a portrait of Berlin's Schönhauser Allee, the street he had lived on for decades (Variety). He had started work on the film in 2023, intending to train his patient, observational lens on the thoroughfare at the centre of his own life (Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion).

After his unexpected death, two longtime collaborators stepped in. Peter Badel and Chris Wright completed Übergang and are credited as its co-directors. They were given full access to Heise's personal archive by his husband, Michael (Variety).

The finished film is not simply the Schönhauser Allee portrait Heise set out to make. It widens into a tracing of Heise's own life, combining newly shot footage with archival material and photographs. The Locarno programme lists the format as DCP 4K, in colour and black and white — a texture that suits a film bridging past and present (Locarno Film Festival).

Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion produced the film. The company's site notes that Übergang was completed after Heise's death, and the Locarno archive lists it as a 2026 German production directed by Badel and Wright (Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion; Locarno Film Festival).

What makes the premiere quietly remarkable is the rarity of the situation. A director dies mid-production, collaborators inherit the material, and the finished work screens at a major festival — billed, in Locarno's own listing, under the names of those who completed it rather than the name of the film-maker who started it. The credits honour the labour of finishing without obscuring the absence at the film's centre.

Übergang — the title translates as "transition" — screens out of competition, the festival's non-juried section reserved for works given a prominent platform outside the prize race. For Locarno, that placement signals the film is being treated as an event in its own right, not a sidebar curiosity.

Heise built his reputation over decades with documentaries that examined German life — its histories, its institutions, its ordinary streets — with a patient, unhurried gaze. That Übergang turns that gaze partly on himself, through the hands of collaborators who knew his work intimately, gives the film a circular quality: the observer becoming the observed, the street becoming the film-maker.