#Where hands touch movie#
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. Starring: Amandla Stenberg, George McKay and Abbie Cornish. No matter how much humiliation she’s subjected to, Leyna is determined to assert her German identity. They are bound by the realization of the horrors being committed against the Jews. 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. When 15-year old Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), daughter of a white German mother and a black African father meets Lutz (George MacKay), a member of the Hitler Youth ¬- compulsory for all Aryan boys since 1936. (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. Her single mom, played by Abbie Cornish, is, on one evening, panicked by a visit from the local Gestapo. Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), about to turn 17, is one of these children. 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. The movie begins in 1944 in idyllic-looking Rüdesheim, in the Rhine Valley. Where Hands Touch is ultimately let down by a deeply contrived narrative and tone-deaf melodramatic style which only serves to diminish the importance and urgency of the real life stories behind.
Asante’s new film, “Where Hands Touch,” an attempt to tell one such story, is a gut-wrenching misfire.
I agree with the filmmaker Amma Asante that their stories should be told. In Nazi Germany during World War II there were 25,000 people of color, many of whom were killed by their fellow Germans.
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