San Francisco Frontiers - German far-right voters don't deserve empathy, says director Akin

Not that the Turkish-German filmmaker -- who burst onto the scene with "Head-On" before winning a Golden Globe for "In the Fade" -- believes those he sees as their modern German equivalents are worthy of an ounce of empathy.

"People are always saying we should try to understand these people who are voting AfD," Akin said, referring to the far-right Alternative for Germany party which has been accused of toying with Nazi rhetoric and nostalgia.

"But why should we be understanding of people who don't want to understand us?" Akin asked.

"I don't care what JD Vance (the US vice president, who infuriated German leaders by meeting the AfD) says... I will not give them empathy. No freedom for the enemies of freedom," he told AFP.

Germany's spy agency classified the AfD as "extremist" earlier this month, allowing it to monitor the country's biggest opposition party. The AfD denounced the move as a "blow against democracy" and the agency suspended the move pending their appeal. But Vance also attacked the original decision.

In Akin's new film "Amrum", set on the North Sea island of the same name off northern Germany in the last days of World War II, our hearts go out to a young boy who tries to save his mother -- a Nazi true believer -- as she spirals into depression at Germany's defeat and Hitler's death.

Yet "there is no sympathy for the devil... in this graceful and profound drama", wrote Tomris Laffly, critic of the film bible Variety.

Akin makes clear the film is a warning about the here and now, with AfD emerging as the most popular party in the German elections earlier this year.

"In the 1990s, the Nazis were bald-headed guys with bomber jackets in the east," he told AFP. "Today they're all over the place -- your family, your friends, your neighbours. You're touching them."

In the film, the Nazis are in a minority on the island just as they were when Hitler came to power in 1933, but they rule the roost.

- 'Banality of evil' -

"Certain forces in Germany are trying to make Nazism as mainstream as possible now, to make it boring and normal," the director warned.

Akin sees the same "banality of evil" in the AfD leaders like banker Alice Weidel.

"She's boring, uncharismatic, unfriendly, always in a suit," he said.

Akin draws out the emotional coldness and cruelty of Nazism in one heartbreaking scene in the film, drawn from the childhood memoir of his friend and mentor, the director Hark Bohm.

After the boy goes through hell to please his mother, she pushes him away when he cries in her arms. "It is cry-babies like you that have lost us the war," she tells him.

There is the same "frightening coldness" about Weidel and the German far right, Akin argued.

It is that "lack of humanity" that haunts Hamburg-born Akin, the child of Turkish immigrants who has gone on to be the most critically acclaimed and successful German director under 70.

"I am afraid that if 12 million people vote for the extreme right... does it mean that there are 12 million unfriendly people in Germany too?" he asked.

"Amrum", which stars the German-born Hollywood star Diane Kruger, has had glowing reviews in Cannes. Screen called it a "delicate, rather heartbreaking coming-of-age story... which shows the precision that can be achieved on a smaller canvas" with a family-friendly film.

Bohm, 86, had wanted to film his own book himself but was too ill and handed the project to Akin, who dedicated the film to him, calling it a "Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin".

K.Torres--SFF