Fatih Akin is a German director, screenwriter, and producer of Turkish ancestry. His films have won numerous awards and accolades, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his film “Head-On” (2004) and Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival for his film “The Edge of Heaven” (2007). I have only seen a few of his films, but I remember them as ambitious, raw, and emotionally explosive, exploring subjects like ethnic identity, immigration, and cultural conflict.
“Amrum” is a very different film—modest, relatively tranquil, and elegantly composed (big skies, flat land, flocks of birds, and water everywhere)—taking place on a rural German island in the North Sea. However, the landscape also feels desolate—the beauty touched with trepidation. It is the last days of World War II, with Berlin about to fall. We see the world through the eyes of a sensitive, thoughtful 12-year-old boy, Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), who lives with his mother Hilla (Laura Tonke), aunt, and younger siblings. His mother and father are committed Nazis (the father is a prisoner of war), and Nanning still wears his Hitler Youth uniform.
At this point in the war, some of the other Germans on the island have begun to reject Hitler and the Nazis—either out of conviction or self-preservation. But Nanning is an innocent, and he is still in the process of coming of age. He understands little of what is happening in the larger world and continues to adhere to his parents’ politics.
Radio news announces the fall of Hitler. And around the same time, Nanning’s mother gives birth. She is shattered by the death of Hitler and refuses to eat anything other than white bread, butter, and honey—foods that have nearly disappeared during the war.
Out of deep love for his mother, Nanning sets out on a journey to find the food that she craves. On his journey, he and his friend Hermann (Kian Köppke), whose mother is vocally anti-Hitler, visit his grandfather, who teaches him how to gut a rabbit. He also drops in on an old whaler, whom he helps kill a seal. Nanning’s journey is interrupted by a group of school bullies who beat him in the manner young bullies have often done without cause or ideology—just the strong beating the weak.
Nanning begins to have doubts about his mother and the ideology that dominated their lives. (He dreams about his Uncle Theo who left for the America after his mother and father refused to help his Jewish girlfriend escape the concentration camps.) Though he is still 12 years old and remains linked to his mother, his way of seeing the world has evidently begun to change.
Akin succeeds in avoiding depicting Hilla stereotypically but creates someone so blindly linked to ideology that she is both pathetic and unreachable. And he successfully evokes Nanning’s slow coming of age in a world where betrayal and adherence to a murderous ideology had been the norm. “Amrum” is a film worth seeing.
