News of Hitler’s loosening grasp on Europe reaches the small island village of Amrum. Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), a member of the Hitler Youth and son of a high-ranking Nazi colonel, makes mention to his mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), of the anti-Reich sentiment already coursing through the town, it sends her into a deep depression. To cheer her up, Nanning toils away at odd tasks and barters around town for the ingredients to make his mother the one thing she desires most, some white bread with butter and honey, but he finds that these humble ingredients come at a greater cost now that the tides of war have changed.

Faith Akin directs Amrum from a script cowritten with Hark Bohm who based the story off of his own childhood memories. The 91-minute, coming of age drama debuted in the Premieres category of the 2025 edition of the Cannes Film Festival where it was picked up for stateside distribution by Kino Lorber.

The unassuming film starts our pleasantly enough, a quality only aided by Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s cinematography that captures the sea salted air and sun dappled countryside through his lens transporting us to fully into Bohm’s rose-tinted memories as if they were our own. Even as far as the actual story goes, Amrum is nothing if not a pleasant little adventure of a boy trying to do something nice for his mother. This tweeness is purposeful as it makes the contrast between the very real changing of the times all that more stark.

Akin eases us into this darker territory, giving us a strong flash of it over a tense dinner conversation where Hille takes deep offence that Nanning has been exposed to anti-war rhetoric seeing it as a discreditation of the sacrifices made by the men of the German army. With the light of the next dawn, however, Akin has mellowed his turn but Nanning’s secure world is beginning to show cracks. One of the throughlines established in Nanning’s crucible is the question of his belonging. Having moved to Amrum after his family home in Hamburg had to be evacuated after a bombing, the local children do not see him as a full-fledged Amrumian despite generations of his extended family having called the island home; neither do the refugee Polack children that have been moved to the island want to accept Nannig after being displaced and victimized by his father’s war. This shunning on the schoolyard is still a pivotal moment in Nanning’s coming of age, and it is a rejection of Hitler’s grasp over a nation, albeit one that is scaled down to fit Nanning’s childhood perspective.

Beyond the schoolyard tussles, Akin also increases the danger in the lager social landscape. Hille has tipped off the command that Tessa (Diane Kruger), a potato farmer with near immunity thanks to her trade, has been making disparaging remarks about the war campaign and her livelihood is threatened by the state. She lashes out at Nanning, forcing the boy to leave the farm where he worked. Later, when he visits his Uncle Onno (Jan Georg Schutte) seeking some sugar, he is asked to recite the pledge of the Hitler Youth, and while Nanning is dressed in his uniform, he struggles to recite the pledge having seen first hand just some of the far-reaching effects of the regime’s control over Germany and the ideology which has since been cemented into his head is beginning to shake loose.

The script is carefully structured to dismantle the arguments for isolationism by showing, quite literally, how news will travel and dissent will grow even on an island. It is part of the hope of the promise of the film that no matter the bluster, there is a human spirit that will not be squashed. Given that this is semi-autobiographical, Nanning’s lessons are learned more through witnessing that will contribute to his growth more than trials, punishment, and penance. Instead, it is his mother who is admonished for her allegiance to a dying and destructive regime.

In the final sequences of the film, Akin recalls the schoolyard alienation of Nanning, this time through Hille’s perspective, allowing Tonke to break free from her until-now depressive role. With two young boys and an infant in a stroller, she makes her way to the butcher shop and attempts to buy some meat using Reichsmarks. Schlachter Jens (Dirk Bohling) informs her that the currency is no longer accepted and that he cannot give her any sales on credit because soon everyone will come asking and she has already proven herself to have loose lips. It is a bit like the morals of one of Aesop’s fables coming to fruition, but instead of taking her lesson gracefully, Hille steals a sausage on the way out of the shop only to be stopped by Jens and admonished in front of the town and in front of her children. The following scene is the family packing up their belongings to head back to the main land with Hille’s stubbornness on full display promising that they will return to the island; clinging, again, to a false hope and flawed belief.

As the saying goes, there is often no better time than the present. While it may seem a little strange to release a film asking audiences to broker sympathies with ancillary characters to of the Nazi regime, especially while audiences in the States are watching their government be dismantled by a fumbling führer of their own, by placing the story in the final weeks of Hitler’s reign, Amrum actually presents a story that is hopeful without wiping away accountability. It has a very similar approach to these themes as Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (2023) which also focused on a high ranking Nazi family and urged audiences to not let the actions of the monsters that sit in the seats of power to be forgotten. While Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) was not the architect of Auschwitz, Glazer nevertheless damns her for standing idly by as these atrocities were knowingly committed. Amrum, however, presents its thesis in a much more palpable way with a filmmaking style that is far less abrasive and jarring as Glazer’s. To some, though, that lack of anger can rightfully be seen as being too soft, but Akin is also chasing after a slightly different goal. As seen in the final act of the film, he is not letting those in the orbit of the Third Reich slink off, but he is out to show that there is a voice of dissent and an uncrushable human kindness no matter how the government will try to inflate the reach of their power.

At the heart of it all is the evolving relationship between a boy and his mother; one that can be all too real for audiences faced with people close to them who have fallen in line with MAGA ideology. Billerbeck is asked to convey such a wide range of changing emotions as he watches his mother suffer not only from her depression but also the animalistic lashing out and anger from the disillusion of Nazism. There is a dwindling spark of love in his eyes for her until nearly the very end, and when his outburst is brushed aside as bothersome by Hille who never once considered that it was coming from such a deep place inside of him, the light in his eyes towards her has fully extinguished. It is a moving scene which serves as the major dramatic moment in the piece, one which was carefully constructed from simple moments across the runtime and turned into something quite powerful, not unlike how simple flour, sugar, and eggs can be transformed into a loaf of bread or how friends and neighbors can come together to build a community in spite of tyranny.