Fatih Akin’s poignant coming-of-age drama about a boy on the North Sea island of Amrum in the last days of the Second World War.

A coming-of-age drama about a boy on the North Sea island of Amrum who loses his child's innocence under the impression of the ideological divisions and shifting power relations in the last days of the Second World War.

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It is spring 1945 on Amrum, a windswept island off the North Frisian coast of Germany. Twelve-year-old Nanning spends his days fishing, hunting seals and working on a neighbour’s farm to feed his pregnant mother and younger siblings, whilst his father, a Nazi officer, is a prisoner of war.

When news of Germany’s defeat and Hitler’s death reaches the island, Nanning’s fanatically devoted mother plunges into deep despair, refusing to eat. To rouse her from her depression, Nanning does everything in his power to source the ingredients for a special dish from other residents on the island.

Whilst he applies all his ingenuity and knowledge about his neighbours with fierce determination, he uncovers uncomfortable truths about his family and his surroundings and is forced to realise that the greatest threat does not always come from outside.

Set against the backdrop of the barren island landscape and the endless horizons of the North Sea, Fatih Akin tells a quiet, poignant story about the loss of childhood innocence. Consistently maintaining the perspective of twelve-year-old Nanning, he uses a fable-like, gripping plot to bring to life the uncertainty of a child who, in a time of ideological shifts incomprehensible to him, witnesses the blurring of the boundaries between right and wrong.

Fatih Akin directed Amrum from a screenplay by director Hark Bohm, who passed away shortly after the film’s premiere and with whom Akin shared a long-standing friendship and close working relationship. Akin took over the direction after it became clear that Bohm, for health reasons, would be unable to adapt the material – which was based on his own childhood experiences on Amrum – for the screen himself. In order to develop his own approach to the film, Akin reworked the screenplay. His desire, as a German, to counter the current political forces on the far right also played a part in this.

Germany 2025, colour, 93 min, German with English subtitles.

Directed by Fatih Akin. Written by Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm. With Jasper Billerbeck, Diane Kruger, Laura Tonke, Lisa Hagmeister, Kian Köppke, Matthias Schweighöfer, Detlev Buck, Lars Jessen, Jan Georg Schütte, Tjard Nissen, Dirk Böhling, Marek Harloff.

Festivals

Festival de Cannes (Cannes Première, world premiere, May 2025); Hamptons International Film Festival; AFI Fest Los Angeles (Luminaries); Denver Film Festival; International Film Festival of India, Goa; Jerusalem Film Festival; Arras Film Festival; Camerimage; Palm Springs International Film Festival (Country Focus Germany, Jan 2026); International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR, Cinema Regained, Jan/Feb 2026); Seattle International Film Festival; Göteborg Film Festival; Filmfest Hamburg; Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival; Tromsø International Film Festival (Horizons, Jan 2026).

Awards

Bayerischer Filmpreis (Bavarian Film Award) 2026: Best Film; Deutscher Filmpreis (Lola) 2026: multiple nominations, including Best Sound Design (Joern Martens, Tobias Fleig, Corinna Fleig, Richard Borowski).

About Fatih Akin

Fatih Akin, born in Hamburg in 1973, is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker. His breakthrough came in 2004 with Head-On, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. At that point, he had already completed film school, directed two short films, a documentary about his parents’ migration from Turkey to Hamburg, and three feature films.

His next major international success came with The Edge of Heaven (2007), which won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by the European Film Award. With his next film Soul Kitchen (2009), Akin won the Special Jury Prize in competition at the Venice Film Festival.

In 2004, he founded the production company corazón international, through which he produced not only his own films but also nationally and internationally acclaimed titles such as Chiko, Takva: A Man's Fear of God, and Min Dît – The Children of Diyarbakır. In 2012, he launched a new company, bombero international, dedicated exclusively to his own projects. The company’s first production was The Cut, which premiered in competition at the 71st Venice International Film Festival in 2014.

In 2016, Akin directed In the Fade, starring Diane Kruger and Denis Moschitto, which premiered in 2017 and went on to win numerous awards—including the Palm D’Or for the Best Actress (Diane Kruger) in Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. His film The Golden Glove celebrated its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019 and his next film, Rhei

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