There’s a reason behind the odd credit at the start of Amrum: “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” While the two collaborated before on the latter’s In the Fade, this project had a different beginning. Bohm wrote the script to direct himself before realizing he wouldn’t have the strength to do so. Raised on the island of Amrum (and a teen during the film’s 1945 setting), it was surely a very personal project that Akin initially refused to take over.
What ultimately changed his mind was the fact that it needed a rewrite for length. It was through that process that Akin was able to make it just as much his own as its originator’s. It feels more like what occurred on A.I. Artificial Intelligence with Steven Spielberg finishing what Stanley Kubrick began. A baton-passing of sorts wherein the fingerprints of both artists are found to ensure their names are mentioned equally in its “A film by” credit.
Amrum unfolds in its simplest terms as a coming-of-age journey for a 12-year-old boy named Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) who finds himself on a quest to procure the materials necessary to make his mother (Laura Tonke’s Hille) a plate of white bread with butter and honey. What should be an easy task in better days, providing this dish—the only thing she craves after giving birth to a new baby—is virtually impossible now. Practically and emotionally.
Why? Because they reside on this island as outsiders at a time of war, where rations are tight. It doesn’t matter that Hille’s family has owned this house for nine generations—she’s not an Amrumer. To her neighbors, she’s a mainlander from Hamburg. A woman who reveres herself as superior for that fact and her husband’s position in the German military. And, worse still, a Nazi so dedicated to the hate in her heart that she’ll sabotage her own wellbeing to prove it.
The uphill climb Nanning faces is thus two-fold. Not only is he gathering items currently worth their weight in gold (wheat, butter, and sugar) but he must cajole people who despise their eventual benefactor into supplying them. It’s a perfect example of the insidiousness of fascism: we watch how the sins of a parent damn their own child alongside the struggle of that child reconciling his love for that parent against everyone else’s hate for her.
It’s initially presented through the juxtaposition between Nanning’s family and a caravan of newcomers fleeing the Holocaust. Both are refugees (Hille hides from the war via privilege). Both are desperate, hungry, and seeking a sanctuary with which to find solace. So Nanning’s impulse to join the locals in denigrating those newcomers is misguided hubris. To the Amrumers, he’s no better than them. And since he’s a Hitler Youth, the refugees now have reason to hate him too.
Talk about a difficult lesson to learn as a child whose parents instilled in him an identity that’s diametrically opposed to the one embodied by the place in which he now resides. Nanning is a boy like any other who believes his mother has his best interests at heart. He also believes he’s likable and worthy of friends. In this specific environment, though, those beliefs place him on the edge of two worlds, with this moment serving as the fulcrum demanding he make a choice.
Bohm and Akin have created the ideal circumstances with which to force that decision. World War II is winding down, and Hitler’s stranglehold on Europe is days from ending. So all those Amrumers who let Hille wave her swastika flag to protect themselves are becoming bolder in their opinions (Diane Kruger’s Tessa), less secretive with their contraband (Lars Jessen’s Grandpa Arjan), and more open to speaking about the past (Detlev Buck’s Sam Gangsters).
That last point is crucial—it finally presents Nanning with truths about his family that are necessary for him to realize the flaws in and sheer evil inherent to their Nazi cause. He, of course, doesn’t want to accept that the people he loves most in this world could be so callous and cruel. But he’s also seen the proof regardless of whether he fully understood it. He’s witnessed his aunt’s (Lisa Hagmeister) struggles with Hille’s righteousness too. The house of cards is falling.
You can’t help but see the current American crisis in how that unfolds. The reality that so many of us are made to endure the MAGA cult’s xenophobia and bloodlust when walking down the street. How books are being banned. How the Trump administration has rebranded our government as a group of sycophants swearing fealty to the president rather than the Constitution. And the hope of also breaking free as more democratic victories occur in unlikely places.
Amrum also portrays why fascism is always so intent on dismantling education systems built upon foundations of truth and empathy—two of the most antithetical topics to its cause. Because bigotry is a learned trait. Without historical evidence proving its vileness, we’ll be forced to question our own lived experiences doing the same. Billerbeck is never better than when his Nanning is fighting against his own reality with the one he was indoctrinated to believe.
It’s one thing to document the discoveries inherent to child-adult transitioning and the autonomy that results (Akin talks about capturing the spirit of Stand by Me), but it’s another to depict that moment of discovering everything you thought about the world and those meant to protect you from it were wrong. Because it’s not just about Nanning breaking free to acknowledge a better way—it’s also the reality that he must now carry their mistakes with him forever.
Everything he does for the rest of his life will be in conversation with what occurred in his name through no fault of his own—a powerful message for a German film that’s made more potent with everything happening today. We need just as many sobering moments, like Nanning’s dream of Uncle Theo’s (Matthias Schweighöfer) fury, as we do Nazi flags being thrown to the ground. Without reparations and accountability, this will always happen again.
Akin pulls no punches driving this point home—you can’t tell this story with only normal bullying (the refugees accosting Nanning knowing nobody is coming to his defense) and ostracism (the townsfolk are cautious around Nanning in case he blabs to mom). You need the unfiltered, sometimes violent consequences of hate (Nazis don’t deserve a moment’s peace) and the promise that compassion and joy are strong enough to change any mind.
Amrum opens in theaters on Friday, April 17.