Amrum: Preview Club Wrap-Up

by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio

As part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for Amrum, presented by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio on Tuesday, June 2, 2026:

Thank you for a great final screening of another wonderful season of Preview Club!

It’s been such a pleasure to be your host this season, and I look forward to hosting again next season. Please be sure to buy your tickets if you haven’t yet done so, as there are limited spots remaining.

This month’s Preview Club title was Amrum, which we are opening for a run at the Burns on July 10, courtesy of our friends at Kino Lorber.

Amrum had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and was directed by Fatih Akin, a German-Turkish filmmaker who has directed such films as In the Fade (for which he received the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017), Head On (for which he received the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004), and The Edge of Heaven (for which he won the award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007).

The film is co-written by Akin and the great German New Wave actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm, who based the film on his own memories of growing up on the island of Amrum during the waning days of the Second World War. Bohm had co-written Akin’s previous films In the Fade and Goodbye Berlin, and he was initially set to direct Amrum himself with Akin attached to the project as a producer, but Bohm fell ill shortly before production was set to begin and asked Akin to step in and direct the film. In the final shot of the film, Hark Bohm is shown standing on the beach of Amrum, and he was alive to see the film premiere at Cannes last May, but he ultimately passed away in November of 2025, six months after the film premiered.

As an actor, Hark Bohm is best known for his long-running collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (arguably the greatest German filmmaker of the second half of the 21st century), having appeared in a number of Fassbinder’s greatest films, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Effie Breast, Fox and his Friends, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and The Third Generation, along with Fassbinder’s extraordinary television miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. Across his filmography, Fassbinder charted the rise, fall, and aftermath of Nazism, explored the landscape of post-war German culture and counterculture, and highlighted the experiences of marginalized figures in German society—from migrant workers, to ex-convicts, to gay and transgender people. Fassbinder died of a drug overdose at the age of 37, but by the time of his tragic death he had directed over 40 feature films and written over 20 plays, forever changing the landscape of not only German cinema, but world cinema at large.

In addition to his career as an actor, Hark Bohm went on to direct a number of films himself, including 1978’s Moritz, Dear Moritz, 1988’s Yasemin, and 1990’s Herzlich Willkommen—each of which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Like Fassbinder before him, Bohm’s filmography largely centers on outcasts and outsiders, which makes it striking that he decided to look inward with Amrum and tell such a personal story at the end of his life.

Director Fatih Akin, born in 1973 to Turkish parents in West Germany, has spoken about how, when he was asked by Hark Bohm to take over as director of Amrum, he was initially apprehensive about the idea of directing the film. Akin said that Bohm, inspired by recent autobiographical films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, wanted to try and make a film where he could confront the memory of his parents, who were Nazi sympathizers who raised him on Amrum during the Second World War; but Akin had little interest in making a film which tackled subject matter he felt he had no personal connection to.

But, out of love for Bohm, Akin agreed to direct the film, and he has talked about setting out to “find the personal in the material” and to find the things that resonated most with him to breathe life into the material. Akin began with finding inspiration from films he loves, from classics of Italian Neorealism like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Germany: Year Zero, along with coming-of-age dramas like Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me.

I think it’s interesting to compare Amrum to a film like My Father’s Shadow, which I presented for Preview Club back in March, a deeply autobiographical film made by two brothers, inspired by those brothers’ memories of the final day they spent with their father amidst a moment of great political change and unrest in 1990s Nigeria. The concept of memory and its imperfections is so central to My Father’s Shadow as it tries, and I think quite beautifully succeeds, in capturing and depicting the visceral act of remembering.

With Amrum, however, you have a co-writer who, like the brothers behind My Father’s Shadow, is pulling from his own memories, but paired with a co-writer and director born 30 years after the events of the film take place, to parents who first moved to Germany in the 1960s. I think there is immense value in having such different backgrounds and lived experiences between Akin and Bohm as they set out to tell this particular story. The memories of Bohm’s childhood are what gave birth to the film, and they imbue it with such life and specificity, but I think Akin’s distance from those memories helps to prevent the film from devolving into a sentimentality which could feel especially dubious given the thorniness of Amrum‘s subject matter.

Although Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm were born in very different moments in German history, Akin has talked about how the events of the film did still make him think about the state of contemporary Germany, as nationalist and isolationist politics grow increasingly prominent. Amrum wound up being a surprise box office success in Germany, grossing over $8 million dollars, and Akin thinks part of why it struck such a nerve is the fact that so many German people have had to reckon with their own personal connections to the evils committed under the Nazi regime, just as the film’s young protagonist, Nanning, is forced to do as the film progresses. In Akin’s words, with Amrum: “the cinema, in this particular case, works as a therapy session for society.”

Despite being a specific story about a specific (and especially dark) moment in contemporary history, Amrum raises questions which do still feel relevant to our own contemporary moment in time, and it’s a film which has really lingered with me since the first time I watched it.

I hope you enjoyed Amrum, I hope you enjoyed this season of Preview Club, and I hope to see you again next season. I’ll be out of town in July, so you will have a guest host next month, but I look forward to seeing you in August!

Best,

Ian

Amrum opened for a run at the JBFC Theater on Friday, July 10.

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