AMRUM © 2025 bombero international GmbH & Co. KG / Rialto Film GmbH / Warner Bros. Entertainment GmbH / Mathias Bothor
Amrum : Fatih Akin Explores Identity Loss
This is Fatih Akin’s fifth film as part of the Selection. Eight years after Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade) (2017), a dramatic thriller starring Diane Kruger, the Turkish-German director reunites with his beloved actor in Amrum, named after the island in the North Sea, where psychological intrigue looms large in the summer of 1945. A Cannes Première screening.
With Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade), the filmmaker explored pain and a quest for vengeance in Hamburg, his hometown. In the film, Diane Kruger (that year’s Award for Best Actress) played the role of Katja, a woman who suffers the tragic loss of her husband and child. Amrum reexamines some of these familiar themes such as loss of identity and vengeance, but reimagines them in a post-war historical context.
The resurgence of Nazism persistently haunts the filmmaker who admits that before finishing the film he realized that his friends who lamented that they had been living in “a Disneyland-version of Germany,” were now threatening to leave that fairytale world.
Based on a poetic script written by Hark Bohm, Fatih Akin slowly appropriates the screenwriter’s story creating his own vision. The young Jasper Billerbeck, the film’s revelation and in whom Fatih Akin glimpses the new Paul Newman or Brad Pitt, plays Nanning, a 12-year-old boy shaken by the war’s final weeks. A family secret will shatter Amrum Island’s new-found fragile peace.
“Amrum explores the expulsion from paradise. For me, this film has become a mission, a journey into the depths of my German soul.”
Amrum is Fatih Akin’s fifth film as part of the Official Selection, after Crossing the Bridge – The Sound of Istanbul in 2005, Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), which won the Award for Best Screenplay in 2007, Müll im Garten Eden (Polluting Paradise) in 2012 and Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade), in Competition in 2017.
