‘Amrum’ review: Fatih Akin directs coming-of-age drama set in 1945 Germany

Dir: Fatih Akin. Germany. 2025. 93mins

In his retelling of the Dr Faustus legend, written in 1947 with Germany nonetheless reeling from its latest defeat, German novelist Thomas Mann wrote bitterly of what it feels wish to stay in a “nation that can’t present its face”. Comparatively few movies have been made concerning the impact on odd Germans of the sudden collapse of a perception system that had been instilled in a lot of them since delivery, maybe as a result of a a lot larger trauma – that of the Holocaust – made the disgrace of defeat itself appear shameful. It’s a theme that by some means must be approached at a tangent, not head on. Fatih Akin has discovered a approach on this delicate, moderately heartbreaking coming-of-age story set on the German Frisian island of Amrum in 1945.

One thing of a departure for Akin

The opening credit learn “A Hark Bohm Movie By Fatih Akin”. Now nicely into his eighties, Bohm is a moderately cultish, under-the-radar German creator, screenwriter and movie director whose reminiscences of rising up on Amrum through the battle fed right into a script he was as a result of direct. Akin stepped in when Bohm gave up on the concept; the ultimate script was then extensively rewritten by the German-Turkish director of The Fringe of Heaven. Premiering at Cannes outdoors Competitors, Amrum ought to ring a bell with worldwide arthouse audiences, marking a return to kind after 2019’s disappointing serial killer drama The Golden Glove and the little-seen-outside Germany Rhinegold (2022). It may reconnect Akin with the audiences who flocked to 2017’s In The Fade, although this evocative interval piece is tonally fairly completely different from that flashy modern melodrama.

First-time actor Jasper Billerbeck places in a delicate efficiency as Nanning, a pre-adolescent boy who lives together with his mom, aunt and siblings on this flat, windswept island within the North Sea. A platoon of RAF fighters flying overhead, the arrival of wagonloads of civilian refuges and a lifeless airman washed up on the seashore are among the many few indicators {that a} battle’s happening. In any other case, this rural group goes on doing what it’s all the time accomplished: rising potatoes, drying and smoking flatfish, residing in neat thatched cottages beneath Nazi flags that flap within the wind.

Amrum, we quickly study, is a spot aside. It doesn’t fairly know if it’s seashore, sea or land – these parts merge, forming mudflats the place oystercatchers strut and mate, and patches of quicksand lie in await the unwary. It’s a spot of whalers and seal hunters, one which has seen widespread immigration to the US (one salty previous island returnee known as Sam Gangsters). Amrumers speak a dialect so completely different from trendy German that subtitles will probably be known as for when the movie is launched in Germany (Diane Kruger learnt Oomrang for her small half within the movie as potato farmer Tessa). However at dwelling, Nanning’s household communicate ‘correct’ German. He’s making an attempt to work out whether or not he’s a Hamburger (he was born there) or an Amrumer. What actually counts, his closely pregnant mom Hille (Laura Tonke) tells him, isn’t the place you have been born – it’s your bloodline.

How do you assist your Nazi mum when, after the demise of Hitler, she takes to her mattress, lets the brand new child cry and refuses to eat something? Nanning’s reply is to search around for the three unimaginable elements his mom craves – white bread, butter and honey. And hastily, fairly unexpectedly in what was shaping as much as be a worthy, standard interval movie, we discover ourselves watching a quest which may have come straight out of a fairy story. Nanning’s mission will take him to some fairly darkish locations – some viewers could however wince when confronted with a graphic rabbit gutting scene and one other through which a seal is shot at shut vary.

Regularly, Nanning’s quest teases out among the movie’s abiding themes. The place we really feel we belong, and the coercive loyalties that may block any change in that standing. How, as a toddler, you go about discovering that these you’re keen on are deluded. Shot by veteran DoP Karl Walter Lindenlaub in a crisp, traditional type that brings out all of the subdued, brackish fantastic thing about this North Sea haven, with a eager eye for figures within the panorama, Amrum is one thing of a departure for Akin, the type of precision miniature work that may be achieved on a smaller canvas.