Fatih Akin’s third collaboration with Hark Bohm, who worked together with him on AUS DEM NICHTS and TSCHICK, is in the same vein as Bohm’s fantastic youth films like NORDSEE IS MORDSEE, MORITZ, LIEBER MORITZ or TSCHETAN, DER INDIANERJUNGE. AMRUM depicts the childhood memories of Hark Bohm, and is primarily a children’s film, but also a film that tells adults something about the perception of children at the end of the war. Most of all, AMRUM is a North German film, Akin and his cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub (INDEPENDENCE DAY), who grew up in Bremen but is a Hollywood veteran, succeed in capturing the North Sea light over the expansive landscape in a way rarely seen in German cinema. AMRUM glows in this film, and at just the right color temperature.

At its core, the film is about the adventure of 12 year old Nanning who wants to provide bread with butter and honey for his sad mother. Shortly before the end of World War II, the staunchly National Socialist Hamburg family fled to the island. Now the pregnant mother keeps getting sadder and sadder the closer the Nazi Reich comes to an end. The last thing she was happy about was buttered bread with honey. Nanning wants to try to get the individual components together. The seeming miracle cure against mother’s sadness becomes even more pressing once the news of Hitler’s death arrives. On his mission, Nanning discovers some unpleasant truths about his family.

The story of a Nazi boy who has to find his way on the threshold of a new era and in the still wild landscape, between flounders, seals, creeks and depressed fascists, works, although only Detlef Buck as fisherman Sam comes close to capturing the tone of the North Frisian “Öömrang.”

Tom Dorow (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy