Amrum

 

Fatih Akin with Hark Bohm

Director Fatih Akin

Akin with Matthias Schweighöfer and Diane Kruger

Akin with Hark Bohm

Screenwriter Hark Bohm

AMRUM        B+                                                                                                                      Germany  (93 mi)  2025  d: Fatih Akin

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT                                                                                                      by Fatih Akin

Hark Bohm wrote a screenplay full of poetry, grace, and suspense — Amrum. When he realized that he would no longer be able to make the film himself, he asked me. I hesitated — after all, I am an auteur filmmaker who must always find a personal connection to the material. In any case, the screenplay had to be rewritten, as it was much too long. Since Hark writes everything by hand, his own revision would have taken too much time. I offered to take on the rewrite. Hark agreed. In the process, the story grew close to my heart. It was like adopting a child — at some point, you no longer question it, you simply love it unconditionally.

At first, I conceived the whole thing as an experimental film: how can I manage to shoot a Hark Bohm film? I revisited his work, analyzing his camera angles, his direction of actors, his editing — and above all, his attitude. But the closer the shoot approached, the more I realized that this was nonsense. I have to make my own film!

From that realization, everything started to fall into place. The films that came to mind when Hark first told me the story were Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine by Vittorio De Sica. The scenes where Nanning searches for driftwood at night made me think of The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton. The whole film was supposed to breathe the spirit of Stand by Me by Rob Reiner — thus, my cinematic upbringing became the first personal connection to the film. Others followed.

But the most important realization came to me shortly before completion earlier this year: friends who had been living in a kind of Disneyland version of Germany, have started talking about leaving the country. But Goethe said: "Where we are educated, there is our homeland." And I don't want to leave it to the Nazis.

Amrum tells of expulsion from paradise. For me, the film became a mission — a journey into the depths of my "German soul." Perhaps it was the last lesson that Master Hark Bohm taught me: cinema remains an eternal mystery.

There are very few films that accurately depict Nazi sympathizers with any degree of humanity, yet this is no ordinary film, introduced as “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin,” who adapts a first-time, autobiographical novel by the same name based on the childhood memories of German actor, author, and film director Hark Bohm, a long-standing friend of the director, most closely associated as an actor in a dozen films made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died just two months after the film was released.  Both deeply connected to Hamburg, Bohm originally intended to direct the movie himself, but his declining health forced him to hand over the project to Akin.  All the more emotionally powerful because of its dramatic restraint, there’s a lot of heart and soul in this picture, which distinguishes it from others, beautifully blending a tender coming-of-age story about the loss of innocence with the barbarism of the adult world, set against the waning days of the Third Reich, defined by a crushing ideological collapse and moral disorientation, becoming a painterly canvas that accentuates the psychological toll of the characters and thoughtfully expands filmmaker Fatih Akin’s career-spanning exploration of German identity.  Spending most of his career focused on non-ethnic Germans and their experience in German society, this is inspired by Hark Bohm’s own published autobiographical memories growing up as the son of a high-ranking Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) officer during the final days of World War II on Amrum, part of the sparsely populated North Frisian Islands in the North Sea.  It took considerable effort on the part of the entire country to acknowledge mistakes and correct the unspeakable historical sins of the past, where acknowledging guilt is part of a pervasive collective sentiment present in the German national consciousness to the point of becoming an essential part of its postwar identity, which has often been used to justify paradoxical positions, such as the unconditional defense of a genocidal state like Israel, using the memory of the Holocaust as a moral shield against any form of valid criticism or questioning.  With their home in Hamburg destroyed in an Allied bombing campaign, he and his family were forced to relocate to the safer environment of a quiet, rural island, joining others from the “mainland” who have evacuated from their bombed-out cities.  Given very limited distribution, told from the vantage point of twelve-year old Nanning (newcomer Jasper Billerbeck, who was discovered during a sailing training in Lower Saxony, though Bohm was actually only six at the time, too young for the conscientiously-evolving thoughts entrusted to him), who is living with his staunch Nazi-supporting mother Hille (Laura Tonke) in the later stages of pregnancy, his younger brother Macker (Tjard Nissen), and his Aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), spending most of his time working in the potato fields of a nearby farm of Tessa (Diane Kruger), an ardent anti-fascist, who rewards him with milk and food for the chickens,  As a squadron of Allied bombers can be seen overhead, a new group of tattered refugees arrives by horse cart, as the Russians are reportedly only 50 kilometers from Berlin, mostly stared at as outsiders, and while they are treated differently, not really wanted or appreciated, they are all Germans. 

A quiet, atmospherically dense drama that is less politically than humanly told, remarkably distinct in its perspective, essentially a film about maturation, disappointment, and the search for a place in a world in upheaval, Akin beautifully establishes the daily rhythm of life on the tiny island, unraveling in small vignettes that have an accumulative power, becoming something uniquely different, yet also dramatically powerful, turning collective war trauma into a chamber play that is emotionally and psychologically complex.  Nanning has a nearby friend in Tessa’s son Hermann (Kian Köppke), about his same age, who borrows his copy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where they compare notes about what is considered an Amrumer islander, as they have their own language and history, with historical ties to Denmark, renowned as skilled whalers and seafarers, though today their economy has shifted almost entirely from seafaring to agriculture, sustainable tourism, and nature preservation, as the island sits within the protected Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park near the border with Denmark.  Offering freedom and adventure, Nanning hardly goes to school anymore, especially since he is teased there by the other children, who reject him for not being from Amrum and not speaking “their” northern Frisian dialect (the first movie to extensively feature Öömrang), as he was born in Hamburg, continually viewed as an outsider, just like the other war refugees, discovering, even from a child’s eyes, that hatred is part of the human condition.  His parents are fanatical Nazis, where a portrait of Adolf Hitler hangs on the wall in his kitchen, a swastika flag flies outside the house, with his mother being a Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM leader (female branch of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany), his father a Nazi SS Officer who has written numerous books on eugenics, his Uncle Onno (Jan Georg Schütte) is a German Socialist Party board member on the neighboring island of Föhr, while Nanning himself is a member of the Hitler Youth, and proudly wears the uniform.  Caught up in the ambiguity of trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t align with what he’s been taught, Nanning learns about his parents’ hideous convictions and grotesque past, as Akin excels in slowly doling out information, heightening the disarmingly poetic visual style while prolonging the suspense.  One of the few figures Nanning can look up to is his Uncle Theo (Matthias Schweighöfer), who gifted him a whale’s tooth knife before he left for New York City (noting that more Amrumers live in New York City than there are on Amrum).  Over the course of the film, Nanning learns his Uncle Theo was exiled or estranged from the family because Nanning’s parents (and relatives) turned their backs and refused to help Theo’s Jewish fiancée escape a concentration camp, where she was subsequently murdered by the Nazis.  Nanning, of course, has little understanding of what any of this means, finding it hard to believe his parents would do something like that, facing difficult moral dilemmas without providing simple solutions, as the film centers on the child’s slowly realized recognition of his parents’ sin.

From the maker of HEAD-ON (2004), The Edge of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite) (2007), and 2017 Top Ten List #9 In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts), which Bohm co-wrote, Akin’s films tend to be ambitious, raw, and emotionally explosive, where anger, pain, and rebellion simmer, exploring subjects like ethnic identity, immigration, and cultural conflict, yet this is a very different film, on a much smaller scale, calmer, unusually measured, more intimately spare and introspectively subdued, told through the warmth of a child’s eyes, where the massive sky and setting sun merge above the restless sea, with wind in the dunes and water everywhere, featuring plenty of scenes of animals in their natural environment, like beetles on blades of grass, waterfowl on the beach, honey bees, geese in flight, or desolate mudflat sequences that reveal what the tide has brought in, which feel more like poetic Terrence Malick touches. Cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub captures Amrum’s stark and unforgiving landscapes through expansive wide shots, often pulling back to reveal a vast, water-saturated terrain that feels suspended in time, with the island dotted with thatched cottages.  The film turns when Nanning innocently announces that he’s heard that the war may be over soon, where he’s excited about the prospects of seeing his father again, but his mother, a prisoner of her blind allegiance to Nazi ideology, sternly sets him straight, indicating this kind of talk only weakens the troop’s morale, as they are risking their lives every day fighting for the Fatherland, claiming whoever told him that deserves to be thoroughly punished.  Despite their hardships, Nanning’s life on the beautiful and windswept island is mostly idyllic, where his mother’s aggressive posture takes him by surprise, not really knowing what to make of it.  After hearing the actual news of Germany’s imminent defeat on the radio, followed shortly afterwards with Hitler’s demise, Hille takes a turn for the worse, falling into a deep depression, keeping to herself, refusing to eat, even after the birth of her child, realizing that the entire foundation of their beliefs, the very social structure that sustained them, is close to total collapse, emblematic of the collective trauma of the nation, wondering “What kind of world is this for a child to grow up in?”  All she talks about is wanting white bread with butter and honey, precious commodities that are nearly impossible to find, but that doesn’t stop Nanning from looking for them anyway, literally scouring the island, discovering it is filled with people responding to Germany’s impending defeat, with some relieved, some fearful, and some in denial.  In a succession of encounters that will highlight the fractures that tear this small society apart, caught up in the enclosed and restricted space, his entire family is viewed as strangers, treated with the prejudice and hostility normally reserved for foreigners, despite the fact they have owned a house on the island for countless generations, discovering how far removed their life is from the others who are not Nazi sympathizers and just want the war to be over, vehemently regarding his family as outsiders whose militaristic views are barely tolerated, as so many of their Amrumer neighbors have immigrant relatives fighting in the U.S. army.     

Akin presents a devastated and unstructured society comprised of convinced Nazis who cling to lies to the very end, war refugees forced to leave everything behind, people thirsting for personal revenge against the Nazi regime, and those who simply wished to be left alone, while addressing the issue of German collective guilt, the legacy of National Socialism, and the question of how this burden would continue to affect later generations.  On some of his adventures across the island he is joined by Hermann, whose mother is demonstrably anti-Hitler, but his grandfather, Grandpa Arjan (Lars Jessen), teaches Nanning how to gut and skin a rabbit, while also discovering his grandfather’s hidden radio tuned to foreign enemy stations that play American jazz, like Fred Astaire’s Cheek to Cheek, Fred Astaire - Cheek To Cheek 1935 (Leo Reisman) (Irving ... YouTube (3:17), or later after the war is over we hear the celebratory sounds of Louis Armstrong’s Stardust, Louis Armstrong- Stardust YouTube (3:34).  He also drops in on an old whaler, Sam Gangsters (Detlev Buck), who teaches him the seal dance, laying on the beach on his stomach while kicking his rear legs, luring seals in from the ocean where Sam can shoot them.  Nanning’s journey is interrupted by a group of war refugees who take advantage of their strength in numbers, stealing what he was gathering for his mother, while beating him up in the process.  Wearing his Hitler Youth uniform, he makes a bike crossing through the mudflats during low tide to visit his Uncle Onno on a neighboring island, seeking sugar for his mother, but he has to recite a Nazi pledge before his uncle will part with it.  Easily the most harrowing experience is his return back home, as the tide has risen, making passage nearly impossible, where he has to wade through water above his shoulders, holding the sugar over his head while steering the bike underwater, until eventually it is too much, where he has to swim, losing his aunt’s bike in the process, returning the next day for butter, only to be confronted by one of the bullies on the journey home, sending them both back into the sea, where Nanning actually ends up saving the other kid from drowning, much to his sister’s gratitude, calmly leaving afterwards with the butter intact.  He has a dream afterwards of meeting his Uncle Theo on the beach, protesting his innocence by stating, “What my parents did isn't my fault.”  His uncle reminds him, “You are not to blame, but you are still involved.”  You can’t choose your parents, but therein lies an underlying theme, that you cannot escape your past and the questions it raises, as Nanning’s emerging moral conscience suddenly awakes to the moral collapse around him, expressing an enduring need for compassion.  In a monumental tribute, set to the dreamlike soundtrack of Hainbach’s Amrum (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) YouTube (7:12), an experimental electronic composer, there is a close up at the end of Hark Bohm with the sun shining on his face, the grownup version of Nanning looking out into the ocean at the setting sun, who lived to see the release of the film, where Akin pays him the ultimate memorial tribute by breathing life into his final screenplay.   

2025 Top Ten List #1 Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi)

 

Director Joachim Trier

Trier with Eskil Vogt at Cannes

Stellan Skarsgård

Trier with his cast at Cannes

Trier with Stellan Skarsgård

SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Affeksjonsverdi)                       A                                               Norway  Germany  Denmark  France  Sweden  Great Britain  Turkey  (133 mi)  2025  d: Joaquim Trier

Winner of the Grand Prix (2nd place) at Cannes, though for my money this deserved to be the Cannes d’Or winner, receiving a 19-minute ovation at Cannes, one of the longest ever, only Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006) at 22-minutes and Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (2004) at 20-minutes are longer, as Norwegian director and screenwriter Joachim Trier has gained international praise and numerous awards ever since his first feature films that include Reprise (2006), 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #10 Oslo, August 31 (2011), 2016 Top Ten List #3 Louder Than Bombs (2015), 2017 Top Ten List #4 Thelma, and 2021 #3 Film of the Year The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), where actress Renate Reinsve won the Cannes Best Actress Award, all co-written by Eskil Vogt.  His most ambitiously mature work yet, shot on 35mm, this examines the boundary between art and life in an unconventional Bergmanesque family drama, as if the children in Bergman’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982) have grown up, only now it’s two sisters in a Daddy/daughter movie, and dead grandmother/daughter movie that features Nazi’s, suicide, love, abandonment, and the reconciliatory power of art, which are some major issues that could be heavy-handed in another director’s hands, but this strikes just the right balance, beautifully weaving it all together so that it makes sense at precisely the right dramatic moments, not always told in linear fashion.  Most importantly, it’s Stellan Fuckin’ Skarsgård, probably the most decorated Scandinavian actor since Max von Sydow who has scarcely been seen in a worthwhile role since suffering a stroke three years ago, appearing earlier in Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014) and A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (2010), also David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Marius Holst’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #9 King of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy) (2010), and of course Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s INSOMNIA (1997).  Playing one of the best roles of his career, providing a tender portrait of a man facing his mortality, he brings a kind of confident yet morose Scandinavian gravitas to the picture, with just a touch of humor.  Early on we see a gifted yet apprehensive Oslo actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) hyperventilating and in a state of panic about having to go onstage for the opening night of a new avant-garde production in Oslo’s National Theatre, where she’s literally freaking out in a scene fraught with tension, reminiscent of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1977).  Literally nothing helps calm her down until she insists that one of the actors backstage, Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie, the actor most associated with this director), have quickie sex with her, but she settles for a hard slap in the face, a rather unconventional approach to calming the nerves, missing her initial musical cue, where the ominous orchestral music from the opening of Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980) stops, leaving utter silence in a darkened theater, but it begins again as she finally comes to her senses and boldly takes the stage, suddenly in full command of the audience.  Heartfelt and deeply perceptive, with an opening third-person narration that is quite lovely and compelling, with clever flashbacks that illuminate the strange history of the 100-year old family home, this sets the scene for how the story unfolds, allowing viewers behind the scenes and under the surface in this closely observed family drama, divided into segments, like chapter headings, which are identified by fades to black.  Trier, who is himself the grandson of the Norwegian director Erik Løchen, makes films that are so richly layered, terrifically acted, and thoughtfully written, employing a classic tradition of arthouse filmmaking that is at odds with the way films are made today, delving into the interpersonal, probing into the consciousness of viewers, with explosive ideas continually lingering in our imaginations.   

Like Bergman, Trier also uses stage and film as a mirror of the reality of his characters.  Nora, a name associated with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, lives with her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) in an immense family home in the outskirts of Oslo surrounded by overgrown gardens and trees that essentially becomes a central character of the film, filled with family secrets and memories, like Maurice Pialat’s historically expansive six-hour television film The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971).  Following the death of their mother through a long and painful illness, both are agitated and upset that their absent father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) arrives unexpectedly for the memorial service, and may be returning back home to sell the house, a place he hasn’t lived in for years, where they don’t want their lives uprooted and placed in turmoil, viewing their father as a destabilizing authority figure.  It’s the earlier death of Gustav’s mother, however, that haunts the house, as she committed suicide in one of the rooms in what was just another ordinary day, nonchalantly sending her child off to school before taking her own life.  Nothing has ever been the same since, where their distant father’s patriarchal presence hovering over their lives only fans the flames of emotional distress, where Nora in particular has never overcome the emotional wounds of the past, using her grief and anxiety to fuel her performances, but she’s reserved and isolated, with a private life that’s a disaster, unable to communicate to others with the ease of her sister.  The much more diplomatic Agnes, on the other hand, has settled down with a family, raising an adorable nine-year old son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), leading a much more stable life.  For his birthday, Gustav brings Erik hilariously inappropriate DVD’s of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (La pianiste) (2001), amusingly informing him “This is a film that will help you understand women.”  The sisters are close-knit and remain best friends for life, with much of the drama revolving around the intimate moments of their lives.  Nora turns to the man that slapped her, Jakob, for emotional support, a colleague and romantic interest, having a secret affair with him, but questions linger.  Gustav is an outsider, having abandoned the family after divorcing their mother, becoming a renowned Norwegian filmmaker living in Sweden, as we see part of a revered early wartime film where a young girl flees from soldiers during World War II and saves herself on a departing train while her brother is left behind and caught, with the camera remaining on the face of the crying child for minutes, who turns out to be his daughter Agnes as a child, where the film is being shown at a film retrospective at the Deauville Film Festival in France.  By introducing Gustav and the international power of cinema into the picture, Trier has taken a different approach to the loud political posturing and nationalistic divisions that currently separate us, preferring a medium that unites us, where the idea of listening and embracing the point of view of others seems like a radical concept, but it can also be personally transforming, creating an emotionally complex story that revolves around the healing power of tenderness, with no real false notes, where this film is about inheritance, pondering philosophical questions about what we ultimately pass down as our legacy, distinctly rooted in the wounds of personal history, using the power of cinema to elucidate the feelings we often fail to express.  One of our most insightful and humane filmmakers, whose works are both organic and literary, Trier’s characters feel lived-in because they’re complex and flawed, which makes them more relatable, as there are no villains, heavy-handed scenes, or over-reaching melodrama, with a mostly understated, melancholic piano score by Hania Rani.

The once-famous and now almost-forgotten Gustav’s new project, his first in fifteen years, is to make an autobiographical film about his mother in the family house, which he has written with Nora in mind, but when he proposes the idea to her, she has no interest whatsoever, determined to be not like him, and turns him down without even reading the script, still stinging from his abandonment at such a crucial stage in their young lives.  During a screening of his earlier work, Gustav is introduced to American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who is impressed by the multi-layered assurance of his film, with its multiple perspectives, and eventually agrees to work on his new project, which has an intoxicating effect, Sentimental Value Exclusive Movie Clip - Beach Horse (2025) YouTube (1:09).  With that collaboration, the film has a movie star attached, a Netflix streaming distribution deal, and a script in English to accommodate its American lead.  When the two of them arrive unannounced at the family home, both sisters are suddenly aghast at what they see out the window, with Nora quickly skipping out the back door, SENTIMENTAL VALUE | Official Clip | Coming Soon YouTube (1:42), while an exuberant Rachel recognizes Agnes from the film and actually wants to take a selfie with her.  The film begins with the perspective of the two daughters, but expands into multiple perspectives of the parents, children, and families as it evolves, jumping between characters, and back and forth in time, becoming a sophisticated chamber drama probing the emotional exploration of art and the personal cost that often accompanies its creation.  Gustav’s script, it turns out, is a stand-in for the emotional divide that the family is unwilling to discuss, an expression of how trauma has been passed down the family line, where the full complexity of its reach is only revealed during a walk-through reading with Rachel Kemp at the family home, where she takes her work seriously, and how personal this project is, painstakingly trying to find her place in the role, never more disturbingly uncomfortable than a concluding scene of a hanging suicide in one of the back rooms, an incident that happened when Gustav was only seven, yet shooting this in the house where it occurred only dredges up painful memories and adds to the burning intensity of the experience.  In Kemp, Gustav undergoes a Vertigo (1956) obsession, continually altering Rachel’s look to appear more and more like his daughter.  For viewers, Elle Fanning is miscast, yet that’s precisely the point, having her own misgivings with the role, as she recognizes Gustav is trying to make her into something she’s not, where even the English language she speaks doesn’t make sense when everyone else around her is speaking Norwegian.  At its core, the film explores the fractured communication between Gustav and Nora, where she’s inherited his aversion to intimacy, choosing to have an affair with someone who’s married and unavailable, refusing to believe they are mirror images of one another, where their guarded distance reflects personal longing and unresolved grief.  Nora’s anxiety is portrayed with elegance and sensitivity, with giant posters of Kemp’s perfume ads showing up all over the streets of Oslo, as if taunting her, while Gustav is never less than authentic, sublimating his own anxieties into artistic expression, yet Trier and his cinematographer Kasper Tuxen masterfully superimposes Gustav’s face with his two daughters in what can only be described as a tribute to an infamous Bergman shot from Persona (1966).  

At every step of his new movie’s production, Gustav is forced to realize how cinema and his experience of making it have changed since his last movie over a decade ago, where his trusted cinematographer Peter (Lars Erik Väringer) can barely walk without an assisting device, making it impossible to hold a handheld camera, and his trusted producer Michael (Jesper Christensen) finds it more difficult to raise the needed financing, as Gustav is viewed as something of a has-been, no longer relevant in the industry, where his best days have passed him by.  But he refuses to be deterred, even after Rachel drops out of the picture, as she realizes this project is more than she can comprehend in terms of attempting to heal deeply personal family wounds.  One of the telling scenes is with Agnes, as Gustav has convinced her young son Erik to be in the picture, without informing his mother, which she finds insulting, as she takes great care in keeping her family together.  But this incident forces her to read the script and do some digging, where she’s utterly shocked that it’s not at all what she expected, revealing an empathy her father had rarely shown them in real life, especially the revelations about Gustav’s mother, who was arrested and tortured by the Nazi’s after joining the Resistance and spent two years in prison.  One of the more excruciating scenes is watching Agnes review her grandmother’s prison file during the Nazi occupation of Oslo, where some of the most devastating images are photographs and records of torture.  There is a stunning correlation between Holocaust survivors and suicides, where studies have shown they are three times more likely to commit suicide.  To an outsider, these are just statistics, but to a family member, this is a shocking revelation, offering insight into her troubled state of mind that might never have otherwise been known.  The tragedy that has occurred in this house has lingering traumatic effects, delving into the psychological implications, where it effects each one of them differently, yet no one is left unscathed.  Agnes was always the stabilizing force for her more insecure sister Nora, but that was not always the case.  One of the most wrenching scenes in the entire movie is between them, with Nora wondering how Agnes survived their family relatively unscathed, to which she responds, “Because I had you,” a moment that changes everything we have seen so far, turning deeper, darker, and more truthful, plumbing emotional depths that no other film seen this year has achieved.  This literally opens the floodgates, as the last half hour is simply superb filmmaking, challenging the collective amnesia of the nation, where heroic courage against the Nazi occupation and damning complicity are often blurred, with more than a few surprises, but each of them plunges us into entirely new emotional terrain, even what happens to the house, which is as horrifying as anything else seen, with rooms resonating with textured emotional history, where the home has a specific family legacy that matters only to them.  Trier displays immense trust in his cast, who telegraph the magnitude of their characters’ feelings through their faces alone, captured in close-ups and long wordless shots, where it’s all about personal growth, while at the same time this is one of the better narrative films about the process of filmmaking, bringing together all the different elements involved, where it’s easy to see how it could collapse at any moment.  A film of quiet devastations, uncomfortable laughter, and exposed vulnerability, we also discover the fragility of what lies beneath the surface, turning melancholic, hopeful, and unresolved, yet what lingers most is the film’s emotional honesty.  A simply magnificent ending is told with poetic grace and skilled precision, revealing the nature of art as a healing force, which extends to the world at large, where few filmmakers can bring this deep emotional abyss to such a stunning resolution through the power of cinema as brilliantly as this, turning into a remarkable achievement of emotional depth and cinematic elegance.