Fatih Akin Made a Nazi-Era Coming-of-Age Film as a Favor — Then It Became an $8 Million Hit

An established German/Turkish auteur based in Hamburg, Fatih Akin has always subverted the conventions of narrative storytelling, from his early films “Head-On” and “Crossing the Bridge” to Cannes prize-winner “The Edge of Heaven.” This year, his Cannes premiere “Amrum” surprised everyone, possibly including festival director Thierry Frémaux, who did not give Akin his usual competition slot.

“If I’m at the festival, I have that Palme on the poster,” said Akin on Zoom from Hamburg. He had the last laugh when “Amrum” proved an $8-million box-office hit in Germany. (Akin is already in post-production on a new film, “Ghost Song,” which he is aiming to complete in time for Cannes. “It’s a tragic love story,” he said, “and it’s arthouse for teenagers.”)

Set in the last year of World War II on the remote North Sea island of Amrum, the story is told from the point of view of 12-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), whose zealot mother (Laura Tonke) is raising him as a good Nazi while his father fights in the war. When his mother falls into postpartum depression, exacerbated by the death of Hitler, Nanning sets out to cheer her up by making her favorite food: white bread, butter, and honey. His island hunt to find the needed ingredients turns into a hero’s quest.

Anyone who knows Akin’s work will instantly recognize that the movie is shot with a spare, classic aesthetic distinct from his usual thrumming style. That’s because Akin was initially set to produce the film for his old friend, Hamburg’s German New Wave and Rainer Werner Fassbinder veteran (and octogenarian professor) Hark Bohm, whose experience as a judge helped Akin co-write “In the Fade,” which earned Diane Kruger Best Actress at Cannes 2017.

But when Bohm fell ill, Akin first co-wrote the story based on Bohm’s childhood memories in Amrum, and then agreed to take over the movie altogether. Sadly, Bohm died in November, 2025.

At first, Akin planned to change his entire aesthetic to honor his friend. “What am I doing here?” he thought. “I don’t know anything about this world. I don’t know how these people eat their cake and how they drink their coffee. And, I know nothing about the countryside.”

Finally, Akin said, “‘OK, this is not me. But he asked me to do it, and I accepted.'” He studied Bohm’s body of work, shot by shot. But three weeks before production, the director realized, “This is wrong,” he said. “I should not do it the way he would do it. I should do this film the way I would do it. I try with each film to do it different. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes not.”

So he went ahead and made “A Hark Bohm Film by Fatih Akin.” He admired the post-war Neorealism films, from Vittorio de Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” to Roberto Rossellini’s “Germany: Year One,” he said. “I had the chance to make it as simple and powerful as possible.”

With his Turkish background — his parents immigrated to Germany in the ’60s before he was born — Akin can watch German society from a bit of a remove. “Amrum” became a sleeper hit in Germany, grossing more than $8 million. (More countries are still opening the film.) “The film was an event,” he said. “It hit a nerve here. I think it was because of the rise of the far right, which we’re dealing with in Germany. This is serious, in a way. The Second World War, Nazi Germany, it’s still a trauma we have not overcome, not at all. This de-Nazification program of the Americans, la, la, la, la. That didn’t work. The cinema, in this particular case, works as a therapy session for society.”

Diane Kruger in ‘Amrum’Kino Lorber

In Germany, “there was no resistance,” he said. “It was not like in Italy. I’m not saying that they were all Nazis, but the majority supported the regime, and later on, the majority was quiet and accepted, maybe because of fear, maybe because they believed in the Nazi thing. But they all have this connection to that. Maybe someone other than me, maybe Christian Petzoldt, would have another approach to that because of the guilt. What I personally believe: It’s not what Germans did to the Jews, it’s what humans did to other humans. So that makes me connect to that.”

Carrying the movie is Jasper Billerbeck, whom Akin’s casting director found at a sailing school. “We were looking for kids who were not afraid of nature,” he said. “Most of the kids from the big cities where most of the acting children are, they see a spider, they go crazy.”

One reason Akin went for Billerbeck: his poker face. “This other kid in the film, his best friend, you see the kid, and you like him right away. My kid could not be like this, sympathetic at first sight. He’s a child of Nazis. We cannot like him immediately. We have to make it a bit difficult for the audience, or difficult for him that the audience like him. And that kid reminded me of Hark’s face. His face is not commenting [on] something. He doesn’t have to act sad or fun; his face reflects whatever the film editing around him explains to us. That’s the value of that face. You can interpret anything into it.”

‘Amrum’Kino Lorber

Another film that influenced his handling of the child protagonists was Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” which Akin first saw when he was 12. “Rob Reiner took the kids seriously. He put the camera on the eye line of the kids, and he was one of the kids. He didn’t look from up down to the kids. He was treating them like adults. That approach was something I had in mind. So I tried to stay with the camera on the same eye line as the kid. I never wanted to treat the kid as a kid.”

Akin tapped his old friend Diane Kruger when she offered help if he needed it. “It was difficult to finance the film,” he said. “I sent her the screenplay: ‘Choose whatever you want to play.’ I expected her to play the mother or the aunt, but she said, ‘I would like to do that farmer.’ Because her aunt was a farmer like that character. I asked her to learn [local dialect] Frisian.”

In “Amrum,” Akin leaned into the beauty of the rugged seaside landscape, drawing inspiration from 19th-century painter Caspar David Friedrich. “It was a way of treating nature with humbleness,” said Akin. “The idea of romanticism at that time was to go back to nature. Because it was the rise of the industrialization, suddenly, steam factories were rising, technology was rising, and there was this desire in some of the artists to like nature. Is this not happening today, too, with all this artificial intelligence? That’s why I studied those paintings, which are idealizing nature.”

Finally, this movie found Akin. He didn’t find it. “It came from outside,” he said. “I’ve rediscovered simplicity.”

Kino Lorber opens “Amrum” in theaters on April 17.