Heimat (film series)

Heimat is a series of films written and directed by Edgar Reitz about life in Germany from the 1840s to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland-Palatinate. The family's personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events. The combined length of the five films — broken into 32 episodes — is 59 hours and 32 minutes, making it one of the longest series of feature-length films in cinema history.

The title Heimat (pronounced [ˈhaɪmaːt]) is a German word, often translated as "homeland" or "native region", but due to its German cultural connotations the word has no exact English equivalent. Usage has come to include that of an ironic reference to the Heimatfilm genre which was popular in Germany in the 1950s. Heimat films were characterised by rural settings, sentimental tone and simplistic morality.

Aesthetically, the series is notable for the frequent switching between colour and black-and-white film to convey different emotional states. In 1987 it won a BAFTA for "Foreign Television Programme".

The first film, Heimat, which covers the years 1918 to 1982, was released in 1984. It was followed in 1993 by Die Zweite Heimat, which is set during the 1960s. A direct sequel, Heimat 3 (about the period 1989–2000), was released in 2004, with lead actors from both previous films returning as their characters. Heimat Fragments, released in 2006, was made using unused footage from the previous three films, along with newly filmed material. A prequel film to the original, Home from Home, was released in 2013.