Amma Asante’s new movie follows the story of a biracial girl during the Third Reich. How much of it reflects the film-maker’s fears of where we are heading now?
Amma Asante’s new film, Where Hands Touch, tells the story of a forgotten piece of history – the fate of black victims of the Holocaust. The director saw a picture online – a school photograph taken in Nazi Germany of girls aged 13 or so; a biracial girl looks out from the front row, her eye caught by something off camera. Nothing about the image made any sense to Asante. “She is a little girl of colour. She’s surrounded by what Hitler called Aryan girls, and it’s 1943. I wondered if she was still alive. Then, when I started to research, I realised all my assumptions were wrong.”
Up to 25,000 black people lived in Nazi Germany. Where Hands Touch is a fictional story about a 16-year-old biracial girl, Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), who lives with her white German mother and little brother in the Rhine valley; her Senegalese dad isn’t around. The film begins with Leyna hiding from the Gestapo, who have orders for her sterilisation. The family moves to Berlin, where Leyna begins a secret romance with Lutz (George MacKay), the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer, played by Christopher Eccleston. (It’s one of those films where English-speaking actors talk distractingly with foreign accents.)
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Wj58RD
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