This isn’t a movie with a happy ending. They fall in love, and we are cursed with a movie about their union. The holocaust gets the Twilight/YA treatment and the result is exactly what it sounds like. The stridently theatricalized violence is horrific only because it’s so abjectly manipulative. The area’s residents of color included some people who were disparagingly called “Rhineland bastards” — children fathered (supposedly) by French soldiers of African descent who occupied the Rhineland in the aftermath of World War I. Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), about to turn 17, is one of these children. Amandla Stenberg plays a biracial teenager who falls for a young German officer in Amma Asante’s uncomfortable second world war dramaAsante’s original screenplay is inspired by the historical case of what were crudely called The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Perilously close to the bad-taste border … George MacKay and Amandla Stenberg in Where Hands Touch.Perilously close to the bad-taste border … George MacKay and Amandla Stenberg in Where Hands Touch.

By Glenn Kenny. Her single mom, played by Abbie Cornish, is, on one evening, panicked by a visit from the local Gestapo. What Holocaust movie ever is?


By the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often.Review: ‘Where Hands Touch,’ Set in Nazi Germany, Is a Disturbing MisfireAbbie Cornish, left, and Amandla Stenberg in “Where Hands Touch.” (The actors playing these goons, who, like almost everyone else in the film speak in English with German accents, sound as if they’ve watched too many episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes.”) The family moves to Berlin, which turns out not to be a great idea. Where Hands Touch Directed by Amma Asante Drama, Romance, War PG-13 2h 2m . She stumbled upon this untold story of the Rhineland Bastards (biracial German children) by accident and has dedicated her directing career into producing this film, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Girl meets boy.

Amandla Stenberg plays a biracial teenager who falls for a young German officer in … I agree with the filmmaker Amma Asante that their stories should be told.

This trait is meant, I suppose, to make the viewer reflect on the James Baldwin quote that appears at the movie’s opening: “There are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it.” But the devices this movie constructs to connect to Baldwin’s thought are insufficient, to say the least.As the movie plods on, Leyna meets Lutz (George MacKay), the fresh-faced son of a Nazi bureaucrat who is more gung-ho about Hitler’s crusade than his father is. Since before its premiere Amma Asante's Where Hands Touch raised controversy through, sight unseen, claims that it romanticized Nazis. (FYI: A lot of spoilers ahead for Where Hands Touch.) In Nazi Germany during World War II there were 25,000 people of color, many of whom were killed by their fellow Germans. But Ms. Asante’s new film, “Where Hands Touch,” an attempt to tell one such story, is a gut-wrenching misfire.The movie begins in 1944 in idyllic-looking Rüdesheim, in the Rhine Valley. The younger brother is required to join the Hitler Youth, and Leyna, expelled from school, is put to work in a factory with her mother.No matter how much humiliation she’s subjected to, Leyna is determined to assert her German identity. Where Hands Touch review – misjudged interracial Nazi-era romance. Where Hands Touch is Amma Asante’s passion project, which she has been developing for years. Their secret romance is cut short when Lutz is sent on an army assignment and Leyna is thrown into a Bavarian labor camp.A love scene between Leyna and Lutz leans rather far into a notion that while National Socialism might have been devastating for humanity in general, it could do wonders for one teenage girl’s sexual awakening.When Leyna and Lutz are reunited at the labor camp, which is directly across from a smoke-bellowing death camp that’s cremating Jews, the wobbly scenario becomes full-on grotesque.