In the wake of war, a German boy finds a way forward in the arresting 'Amrum'

The champion coming-of-age stories deduce their powerfulness from being endings arsenic overmuch arsenic beginnings. There’s often a clarifying, poignant harshness successful the losses they depict. That applies — with sobering grace — to the representation ballad “Amrum,” acceptable connected Germany’s titular North Sea land successful 1945, erstwhile the winds of a satellite war’s decision stroke into a 12-year-old boy’s beingness with unexpected consequences.

The movie bears a funny credit: “A Hark Bohm movie by Fatih Akin.” Bohm, who died past twelvemonth astatine 86, was a highly respected movie writer, histrion and academic, a seasoned of Germany’s New Wave. Realizing he’d beryllium incapable to nonstop his fictionalized puerility remembrance, helium entrusted it to his mentee Akin, the firebrand down modern German classics specified arsenic “Head-On” and “In the Fade.” The task became, according to Akin, similar “adopting a child.”

In communicative terms, that child, a stand-in for Bohm himself, is wide-eyed, delicate Nanning (well-cast newcomer Jasper Billerbeck), who works successful the murphy fields of section husbandman Tessa (Diane Kruger, successful a tiny but cardinal role). At home, helium has a large mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister) and 2 younger siblings, but not the high-ranking Nazi serviceman patriarch who relocated them from bombed-out Hamburg to an ancestral location connected this tiny, beachy outpost. Pejoratively dubbed a mainlander by adjacent the friendliest neighbors and mostly viewed with suspicion for his family’s Nazi ties, Nanning is assured by his ideology-soaked ma that their roots, their “bloodline,” marque them existent Amlumers.

The boy’s archetypal existent acquisition successful the shifting sands comes when, astatine dinner, helium remarks that the warfare volition soon beryllium over, intending it arsenic bully quality — Dad could travel home. Yet his parent reacts arsenic if he’d sided with the force by wishing defeat. Later, with the quality of Hitler’s demise, she sinks into a depression, refusing nutrient unless it’s achromatic bread, food and honey, each successful scarce supply. So Nanning sets retired to unafraid her the indispensable ingredients, arsenic if the cloth of his satellite depends connected it.

What follows is simply a tightly told fable-like travel built astir the war-battered realities of endurance erstwhile everyone’s tired, bare and irritated. There are brutal truths successful store for Nanning astir what his household represents. It’s an evolving boyhood, framed with unshowy elegance by cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub against the island’s flat, grassy, weather-rich horizons. “Amrum” avoids the sentimentality baked into truthful galore childhood-during-wartime stories. Akin, arsenic if inspired by the unfussy youthfulness that marked Italian neorealism and the New Waves successful some France and Iran (there are shout-outs to “Bicycle Thieves” and “The 400 Blows”), zeroes successful connected the dependable accumulation of item alternatively than the trappings of cuteness oregon melodrama.

That measured approach, exemplified successful prima Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the galore good supporting turns astir him, allows america to timepiece Nanning’s increasing consciousness of what matters to others, what’s intolerable to disregard and however to construe an unjust satellite that’s inactive afloat of quality and kindness if you cognize wherever to look. Which, of course, includes wrong himself.

Near the end, “Amrum” serves up a wonderfully understated moment: Nanning is invited to observe the war’s extremity with a tiny radical of dancing, drinking islanders. He hangs back, though, arsenic if not rather acceptable to take their joyous alleviation implicit obediently tending to his breached family. But you tin spot this dutiful son’s privation to beryllium 1 of them. For each of america wondering erstwhile an disfigured clip volition fade, the infinitesimal volition resonate similar a cautious, dawning hope.