It seems to me that the most dangerous time in a war or revolution is when the pendulum swings to the other side. Loyalists are now collaborators, traitors are now heroes. Twelve year old Nanning lives with his family on Amrum, one of the North Frisian Islands on the German North Sea coast. His mother’s family originally came from Amrum, but Nanning is treated as an outsider. It is the dying days of the war, and his mother is heavily pregnant and her husband is at war for Hitler’s Germany. Both parents are staunch Nazis, and Nanning is a member of the Hitler Youth. But as Hitler suicides and Germany surrenders, the villagers whose loyalty to the Nazis is paper thin, shun Nanning and his mother. As in The President’s Cake, a young child is charged with finding food in an economy of want, and in this case Nanning is searching for white bread, butter and honey for his mother, who has refused to eat since Hitler died. Nanning’s acceptance of National Socialism came naturally to him, as it was the politics held by his parents, but as the war draws to an end, he sees his parents in a new light and begins to question what he had seen as certain.
At times the film veered into some strange David Attenborough-esque nature photography, and the main child actor had an uncanny similarity to my own grandson. But I enjoyed the movie, and its slow complications
My rating: 4/5
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 