Childhood In Times Of Conflict

BE it Short Sharp Shock, The Edge of Heaven, Soul Kitchen or In the Fade, Fatih Akin, the prolific German filmmaker of Turkish descent, is best known for films that explore immigrant lives.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

With his latest, Amrum, he ventures into the new zone of period drama. A moving documentation of what it is like growing up in a beautiful place — Amrum Island in Germany — but at a treacherous point in history, towards the end of World War II, it nonetheless engages with the contemporary issues of identity and belonging and rings an obviously discernible political bell. What is of the times comes with a timelessness attached. Political indoctrination of the young, after all, is as much a thing of the past as it is of the present and the future.