Amrum

His world collapses, and life goes on… A fictionalised memoir of Young German Cinema master Hark Bohm’s childhood, which turns out to have been the source of his filmmaking.

Amrum, during the spring of 1945. Nanning, 12 years of age, lives with his family on the geest-y North Sea islands. His mother, Hille, is a true Nazi believer, his father, an Obersturmbannführer, away fighting in the war. The Nazi-ruled German Reich is the only world Nanning ever knew – and so, with WWII coming to an end, his whole world collapses... In the last shot of the film, an old man faces the sea.

Hark Bohm, on whose childhood Amrum is based, died on 14 November 2025 and it’s a befitting final entry in his filmography, for Bohm became famous in the 1970s as a director of films for children (Tschetan, der Indianerjunge, 1973) and young adults (Nordsee ist Mordsee, 1976), a subject he would return to all through his career. Amrum now unveils what experiences lie behind his vision of life’s earlier stages – not to mention a Germany whose re-awakening he feared and fought against with many of his films.