Amrum <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/>

Amrum

The preview film for the 2026 German Film Festival is a sombre little drama about a child's perspective of the end of WWII. Jasper Billerbeck plays Nanning, a 12 year-old doing his best to look after his pregnant mother and younger siblings in the tiny farming/fishing island of Amrum in Northern Germany. The opening scene shows German planes flying overhead, indicating that even this lonely outpost of the Reich is not untouched by war.

The story really acts as window dressing for the suppression of emotions and trepidation related to the very probable approaching end of hostilities. We find out early on, in a clever moment in the family library, that Nanning's (absent) dad is a high ranking Nazi, and his mum, Hille, is fully on board with the doctrine. Auntie Ena lives with them and is much more pragmatic, and as anti-Nazi as she can be in the circumstances. The two sisters are played by Laura Tonke and Lisa Hagmeister respectively, and they're fantastic.

Diane Kruger, who also starred in director Fatih Akin's great In the Fade a few years ago, has a small role as thoroughly cheesed off farmer, Tessa. Nanning's inadvertent betrayal of her early on sets the story beats in motion, and I reckon it's a pretty neat way of couching the real-life events. In a nutshell, when his mum stops eating after having the baby, Nanning must play 'The old woman who swallowed a fly' routine. She only wants white bread with butter and honey, none of which are easily sourced on an isolated island suffering from severe rationing.

Nanning must chivvy and scrimp to get the ingredients - hassling the local doctor, baker, apiarist, and his old Nazi uncle across the low tide. He even has to act like a seal to work for a few flatfish (don't ask). All that for a fucking honey buttie. James Garner's Hendley in The Great Escape would have been proud. While all this is going on, Nanning discovers more details of his family's history, including what happened to another, less fascist uncle.

There are shades of Michael Haneke at work here - Amrum has a very similar feel to The White Ribbon. Just like the adults in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, some of these volk seem to have grown straight out of Haneke's masterpiece. Pacing, performances and cinematography tie these three films together to make a pretty amazing triptych.

The film is based on the early memories of prolific actor/writer/director, Hark Bohm, who co-wrote it with Akin but died in 2025, just after its general release (he has a very small cameo at the end). Amrum is showing at the German Film Festival from May 6 - 27 across Australia.

See also:

All of those films mentioned above, but also I really dug Akin's The Edge of Heaven (2007), which is included in a retrospective of his films at this year's festival, along with Head-On (2004) and Goodbye Berlin (2016).

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