Amrum | HSBC German Film Festival 2026
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https://germanfilmfestival.com.au/films/ger26-amrum
Date Reviewed: 23/04/2026
At Palace Cinema Como, the HSBC German Film Festival arrived without fanfare, slipping in quietly confident. A brief welcome from festival director Elysia Zeccola set the tone: “It’s about bringing the best of German cinema here while it’s still fresh, stories that might not otherwise be seen.”
Then the lights dropped, and its centrepiece, Amrum, began.
Presented by Goethe-Institut Australia, the festival continues its sharp, curated approach, a tight lineup of Berlinale titles, audience hits, and emerging voices like Christina Tournatzẽs. At the Como media preview, Amrum landed exactly where it should, as a quiet gut-punch anchoring the program.
Directed by Fatih Akin and drawn from the childhood of iconic German Cinema movement filmmaker Hark Bohm, Amrum looks like a coming-of-age story on the surface. In reality, it’s about the moment innocence fractures.
Set in 1945 on a remote island, it follows 12-year-old Nanning (a striking debut from Jasper Billerbeck), whose days are spent hunting, fishing, surviving. War feels far away on the surface, but it seeps into everything.
In the shadow of a collapsing ideology the family of an SS lieutenant colonel are left to fend for themselves. The eldest son, Nanning, sets himself a simple yet impossible task: find white bread, butter, and honey for his Nazi-loving mother (Laura Tonke), who is on a spiral of grief after Hitler’s fall. The search becomes a pilgrimage driven by love, shaped by scarcity, edged with quiet desperation.
Bread becomes purity, a longing for something untouched. Eggs, fragile and life-giving, mark moments of moral choice, as he steals them but leaves one behind. Honey carries a cruel irony: sweetness as illusion, a fragile attempt to restore comfort in a bitter world.
There are many metaphors and symbolisms to explore in this story of a boy being changed, not suddenly, but by accumulation. He learns to kill rabbits, he witnesses death up close (not heroic, but decayed, abandoned), he steals, he watches his mother steal, each act chips away at the idea that he stands outside it all.
In that sense, Amrum quietly echoes author Jerzy Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird, not in extremity, but in trajectory. A child moving through a brutal world, shaped by what he sees, absorbs, and ultimately becomes part of.
“I can’t help what my parents did,” the boy says.
“No… but you’re still involved,” responds his uncle Theo in a magical dream sequence.
The boy's personal guilt of his parent's legacy is softened by the contradictions of nature. The same birds whose eggs he takes later peck out the eyes of a dead soldier washed ashore.
That tension, love versus accountability, is where Amrum lives. A child coming to terms not just with war, but with inheritance. With the unbearable idea that who raised you might also define what you must confront.
Behind the scenes
Akin strips everything back. Taking over the project after Bohm’s declining health, and his passing shortly after the film’s premiere.
In interviews, Turkish-German director Akin has spoken about his hesitation, questioning his connection to the material before finding it through emotion rather than history. That distance becomes the film’s strength.
Working with cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, Akin builds a world that feels both intimate and exposed. The camera stays low, at Nanning’s eye level, as if taking you by the hand, not just to watch him, but to become him.
This restraint sharpens Billerbeck’s performance. His face doesn’t tell you what to feel, it invites you to fill it in. The result is quietly unsettling. You’re complicit in the emotion.
The night scenes are shot “day for night” due to restrictions on working with child actors, but this necessity become an unexpected strength. The island glows with an eerie, dreamlike beauty that makes for magical nights.
Landscapes inspired by Caspar David Friedrich stretch wide and indifferent, giving Amrum a haunting, almost mythic stillness.
There’s a quiet poetry in how Amrum was made. Bohm, whose childhood shapes the story, was meant to direct before illness forced him to step back. Akin stepping in mirrors the film itself: stories passed down, responsibility handed over.
He approaches it like an outsider. And that’s exactly what the film needs. It gives the story distance and clarity.
Moments that matter
The beauty of Amrum is that it deals in moments to unravel the plot: a body on the shoreline, a hidden radio, voices barely above a whisper, a mother collapsing at the news of Hitler’s fall, children trading food like currency.
And always, that small, aching refrain: “I still need to get honey and butter.”
The war ends, the damage doesn’t and that’s an important message in today’s world. As Amrum pulls you in slowly, almost gently, there’s an inner jolt when you realise the weight of what it’s holding.
It asks what do we inherit, what do we carry, and when the world shifts, who do we become? These are important questions to consider when watching this year’s centrepiece that is a perfect fit not just for the German Film Festival but the world we live in.
Highlights
- A fresh lens on WWII, closer to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Jojo Rabbit than traditional war dramas
- Lyrical “day for night” sequences that feel otherworldly
- Cinematography shaped by Romantic art — the landscape becomes a character
- A breakout performance from Jasper Billerbeck
- The film is not loud, but it’s message stays after the final film credits.
Who’s it for?
- Fans of Jojo Rabbit, or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
- Lovers of European and festival cinema
- Anyone interested in history told through intimate, human stories
- German language learners wanting something immersive and authentic
Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis