For Fatih Akin’s new film Amrum, he recruits two big German actors – Diane Kruger and Matthias Schweighofer. The first plays Tessa, who’s brave enough to badmouth Hitler, and the latter plays Theo, appearing in some dream sequences. These characters live within the life of Nanning Hagener (Jasper Billerbeck), growing up during late Nazi Germany. At 12, he works in Tessa’s farm, and he doesn’t get in her good graces after snitching on her anti-Hitler and anti-war quips. Most of his childhood is idyllic, like learning how to butcher a rabbit with his best friend Hermann (Kian Köppke). Being twelve, he’s in the right age to find out truths, especially ones about his sympathizer mother Hille (Laura Tonke).

Grossing more than $8 million in Germany makes some sense – coming of age films have potential viewership regardless of its setting. On paper, it shouldn’t make sense, since ‘innocence’ and ‘Nazi Germany’ aren’t ideas that shouldn’t be in close proximity. Despite that conflict, this film works because the thing about innocence is that life, in any circumstance, takes it away. Hunting rabbits is an inherently gnarly thing for anyone of any age to do but it’s what happens after that activity. Nanning and Hermann go to the latter’s grandfather Arjan (Lars Jessen), and Nanning discovers Arjan’s radio. Encounters like this in Amrum dispels the idea of Nazi group think and shows Germany’s ideological divisions.

Amrum‘s basic structure, as I wrote above, has Nanning meeting adults and discovering certain truths about his world. This structure, as viewers are seeing Nazi Germany through a child. is deceptively simple and is open to valid criticism. For the most part, Nanning, again, is 12, but he’s spiritually 10, 11 tops, which makes sense after learning the film’s source material. This film is a fictionalized version of the childhood of Hark Bohm (who makes a cameo during the last scene). Bohm was five or six during the fall of Nazi Germany and twelve during the trials indicting the Nazis. It’s valid to see a certain dishonesty in moving up Bohm / Nanning’s age as well as framing this complex world.

Amrum is Akin at his dressiest although he deals with similar topics in his other films like In The Fade. There are other, dumber reasons that I was meaner to In The Fade than I am at this newer film. Perhaps it’s because that former work has fatalist, destructive tendencies while this one is hopeful, towing the line towards naive. After all, and without giving too much away, this film is about a Hitler youth stumbling into a deprogramming education. There’s a truth to what this film is saying. Its most shocking lesson is that one’s parents aren’t the best educators for children. And this is when the other adults step in, taking a village to teach a child of how outside and connections and empathy are helpful.

Film lovers can watch Amrum  in select North American theatres.