Engrossing and poignant humanistic [1] 2025 war drama AMRUM – which had its world premiere in the Official Selection in Cannes – will have its CENTREPIECE premiere at the Palace Cinema Como in Melbourne on 10 May [2] and features as part of the 2026 German Film Festival (GER26) screening across Australia (in Adelaide, Melbourne and Ballarat; itself, “a movie set” [3], Sydney and Byron Bay, Brisbane, Perth, and Canberra).
Acclaimed German-Turkish director Fatih Akin – who, no doubt, has seen his fair share of injustices and have-nots having to bow down to those who have [4] – was awarded a Gloden Globe for his likewise astute 2018 WWII movie In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts [5]).
In Amrum he makes a stark cinematic re-appearance and veritable difference with a film that offers a novel perspective and stands apart from the current flurry of Holocaust movies that insatiably explore THE Jewish suffering. Boldly steering the much repeated, and what seems like an increasingly uncritical discourse, in a different direction, Akin, rather, homes in on culprits on their way out and shows their side of the sordid story.
While in his director’s statement he expresses his admiration for filmmaker-forerunners Vittorio de Sica (Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine), Charles Laughton (arresting neorealist The Night of the Hunter), and Rob Reiner (Stand by Me), in evocative Amrum Akin leaves his own important mark in a nuanced movie that demonstrates that nothing is black and white or what seems to be the case on the surface.
His film based on the book (and childhood recollections) by screenwriter Hark Bohm is comparable in its lingering message of moralistic depth to uncomfortable must-see The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023) and quietly harrowing The Conference (Matti Geschonneck, 2022).
The former, which in the end transports us retrospectively to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim, Poland, presents us with celebrated commandant Rudolf Höss and his family who reside in a fine spruced up home next-door to Auschwitz; a garden wall the only (thin) difference between idyllic life and death and horror (in the film, sound alone transports the viewer to this abominable site of human massacre) [6]. A Nazi killing machine. The banality of evil. [7]
And the latter (The Conference) was included in JIFF, Melbourne, 2025. It will, so it has been advertised, feature again this year. Its story is a “beyond chilling” [8] clinical discussion centred on the Final Solution among top Nazis urgently needing to get rid of the human evidence.[9]
All three films provoke the audience and focus our attention on the final unravelling of the ‘privileged oppressors’ who hold on to their (make)‘beliefs’ or acquired convictions to the very end (“never ever give up”, even if it is more than obvious that you are about to – thankfully – lose).
In Amrum, its title evocative of Swedish word “andrum” (as in “breathing space” or “room to breathe”), the respite for the not so privileged few is, indeed, only very temporary and hardly a respite to talk of. Their remote island habitat is soon no longer a refuge at all for the protagonist pro-Nazi family of somebodies turned nobodies who were once top notch Hamburgers but are now ‘just mainlanders’ and will never be true Amrumers; no matter their family connection to this paradise holding its ground in the midst of (pointless) warfare.
What does matter is political ideals and affiliations, and Nazis are – as the Russians eventually move closer and begin to crack down on their enemies – to the dismay of many Germans at the time, increasingly personae non gratae and the new outsiders.
Germany’s imminent loss in The War of all Wars spelt the end of the Third Reich and Hitler’s personal ‘liberation through suicide’, which, in turn, upended the situation for Nazi supporters including (screened) Hille (Lisa Hagmeister) and her physically absent yet ideologically present high-ranking SS officer of a husband. Fervently defending what would be the side of the losers, her fragile world ends abruptly with the death of the Führer (Hille’s sister has already symbolically killed him off by burning his portrait).
For others, the end of Nazi tyranny meant new beginnings. In the film these fortunate survivors are the Silesian and East Prussian refugees who arrive to Amrum by horse and buggy in a key scene that sets the tone for the rest of the story. [10] As the locals prepare to take them in, the newcomers’ unconquerable hope is cinematically represented by a narrative shift from belligerent darkness to a faint post-war future that might just come with a new lease of life.
Akin shows us how former Nazi ‘victors’, once engaged in a historical witch hunt for secondary citizens (or lesser human beings), momentarily enjoy an island paradise that ultimately does not accommodate for those who, indeed, badly lost their way.
Shedding a light on the other side of the story (or history), the director demonstrates how these defendants of the old-world order had their fate coming all along. Amrum – the film and place a make-believe-world of temporary freedom – exposes and expulses WWII perpetrators, and reveals just to what extent the Nazi family holding on to fickle pretences keeps up impossible appearances.
Only soon to realise, as they watch their lives unfold or rather come crashing down in parallel with the arrival of those newcomers, that luck is no longer on their side. They are now the ones to be shunned, thrown out, rejected and displaced (even if they themselves will have escaped extermination).
By refusing to conform to or regurgitate the conventional WWII narrative we have mostly all seen before, Akin stands out as a director intent on leaving us with a bigger picture that allows for all nuances to complete a highly complex – soon to be – post war reality.
The film impresses in its efforts to provide a different perspective. That new world, specifically, is seen through a child’s perspective (always a smart move, it turns out). Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck’s low key performance speaks volumes) is literally stuck between a rock and a hard place but his devotion for his (shunned Nazi) mother remains intact through it all. And animal symbolism also says it all.
Audiences are inevitably swayed by this film that lingers in our minds long after the end credits have rolled by. Akin’s story is part of a bigger story of them and us but ultimately demonstrates how they might be close to us than we may initially have imagined.
When things come tumbling down – AMRUM tells the story of the real underdogs
Words: Dr Jytte Holmqvist
Images: AMRUM (film stills)
Footnotes:
[1] In Fatih Akin’s words, “I wanted to make a human film, a humanistic film. To do that, I gathered a group of people around me who are committed to this ideal” [of making a film] “as simple as bread with butter and honey”: WATCH the film for a better understanding. (Amrum press kit: www.betacinema.com )
[2] www.palacecinemas.com.au and www.palacecinemas.com.au
[4] Turkish Gastarbeiter were benefitted by the Angela Merkel regime. She forged some kind of connection with Erdogan and famously said, “[i]n a farewell visit”, that “her country will continue to maintain a working relationship with Turkey.” She “stressed cooperation on migration and other issues, and defended Berlin’s diplomatic efforts at upholding human rights”: www.aljazeera.com
[5] Both In the Fade and Amrum star German superstar Diane Kruger who says of the latter that “Working with Faith is a bit like coming home” (aforementioned Amrum press kit).
[7] www.smithsonianmag.com And yes, in response to the rhetorical question “Can one do evil without being evil”, ‘one can most assuredly do evil AND be evil’: www.aeon.co In a nutshell: Action speaks louder than words, and action, already, is a choice.
[10] “We meet Nanning in the summer of 1945, working alongside his friend Hermann (Klan Koppke) on a farm run by Tessa (Kruger). As they till the land, a horse and buggy filled with people pulls up and a brief conversation between Tessa and the driver reveals that those in the wagon are Russian-born German refugees who have been sent from Berlin. Tessa, fed up with the war and keenly aware of diminishing resources within this tight-knit community, denigrates the Nazi cause and hopes for an end to it all”: www.hollywoodreporter.com