Where Hands Touch (2018)

Amma Asante spent twelve years assembling Where Hands Touch, and the patience shows in the research if not the screenplay. The film takes as its subject the persecution of Black people under the Nazi regime, a chapter that most cinema has skipped past entirely. Leyna, a mixed-race teenager played by Amandla Stenberg, moves through a Germany that has criminalized her very existence. Her mother's past is a crime. Her body is a problem to be solved by sterilization. Asante builds the whole narrative on this racial fact, and the film is stronger for refusing to soften it into background texture.

The trouble arrives on a bicycle. Lutz, a Hitler Youth member with an SS father, knocks Leyna down and then falls for her, and the film asks us to invest in a romance that critics have found difficult to swallow. Glen Kenny of The New York Times called it a romanticization of Nazis, and the charge has stuck. The earnestness is real. The film wants us to believe in tenderness inside a machine of extermination, and it never quite earns that belief.

Still, the picture's cultural accounting is lopsided in interesting ways. Its racial consciousness is total, its casting choices deliberate, and its recovery of a suppressed history is genuine. The rest of the modern progressive inventory goes untouched. There is no queer subtext, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character, and its feminism amounts to a woman behind the camera and a girl in front of it. We are left with a somber, well-intentioned war drama that lectures gently about humanity and racism, and does so in period costume. The result is a film that feels important and slightly inert, a monument to good intentions that never quite becomes the movie it wanted to be.