comingofage

The best coming-of-age stories derive their power from being endings as much as beginnings. There’s often a clarifying, poignant harshness in the losses they depict. That applies — with sobering grace — to the memory ballad “Amrum,” set on Germany’s titular North Sea island in 1945, when the winds of a world war’s conclusion blow into a 12-year-old boy’s life with unexpected consequences.

The movie bears a curious credit: “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” Bohm, who died last year at 86, was a highly respected film writer, actor and academic, a veteran of Germany’s New Wave. Realizing he’d be unable to direct his fictionalized childhood remembrance, he entrusted it to his mentee Akin, the firebrand behind modern German classics such as “Head-On” and “In the Fade.” The project became, according to Akin, like “adopting a child.”

In story terms, that child, a stand-in for Bohm himself, is wide-eyed, sensitive Nanning (well-cast newcomer Jasper Billerbeck), who works in the potato fields of local farmer Tessa (Diane Kruger, in a small but key role). At home, he has a pregnant mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister) and two younger siblings, but not the high-ranking Nazi officer patriarch who relocated them from bombed-out Hamburg to an ancestral house on this tiny, beachy outpost. Pejoratively dubbed a mainlander by even the friendliest neighbors and generally viewed with suspicion for his family’s Nazi ties, Nanning is assured by his ideology-soaked mom that their roots, their “bloodline,” make them real Amlumers.

The boy’s first real lesson in the shifting sands comes when, at dinner, he remarks that the war will soon be over, intending it as good news — Dad could come home. Yet his mother reacts as if he’d sided with the enemy by wishing defeat. Later, with the news of Hitler’s demise, she sinks into a depression, refusing food unless it’s white bread, butter and honey, all in scarce supply. So Nanning sets out to secure her the necessary ingredients, as if the fabric of his world depends on it.

What follows is a tightly told fable-like journey built around the war-battered realities of survival when everyone’s tired, hungry and irritated. There are brutal truths in store for Nanning about what his family represents. It’s an evolving boyhood, framed with unshowy elegance by cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub against the island’s flat, grassy, weather-rich horizons. “Amrum” avoids the sentimentality baked into so many childhood-during-wartime stories. Akin, as if inspired by the unfussy youthfulness that marked Italian neorealism and the New Waves in both France and Iran (there are shout-outs to “Bicycle Thieves” and “The 400 Blows”), zeroes in on the steady accumulation of detail rather than the trappings of cuteness or melodrama.

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

Near the end, “Amrum” serves up a wonderfully understated moment: Nanning is invited to celebrate the war’s end with a small group of dancing, drinking islanders. He hangs back, though, as if not quite ready to choose their joyous relief over obediently tending to his broken family. But you can see this dutiful son’s wish to be one of them. For all of us wondering when an ugly time will fade, the moment will resonate like a cautious, dawning hope.

Before becoming a global phenomenon in the 2000s thanks to artists like Aventura, Monchy y Alexandra and Prince Royce, and before being declared an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” by UNESCO in 2019, bachata was — and continues to be — the soundtrack of the Dominican Republic.

The importance of the genre to the people of the Caribbean nation is at the heart of “Agridulce,” a music documentary that had its world premiere at this month’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Filmed over the course of five years, the feature follows four young students at Academia de Bachata, a music conservatory in the beachside resort town of Cabarete. It’s the only school of its kind in the world.

Academia de Bachata was founded in 2013 by music producer Benjamin De Menil. After traveling to the Dominican Republic to record for nearly three decades, De Menil says he wanted to create something that would ensure that the next generation continues the traditions of bachata.

“One of the things I loved about the bachata musicians I was working with early on is that they were such natural musicians. There was never any sheet music, so whenever we were going to record I would say, ‘Let’s do this song and it goes like this,’ and they would listen to it for a little bit before they figured it out and they were playing it,” he said. “I thought that we could somehow harness that energy in a more organized and educational format and make a school where we’re helping young children become professional musicians within this genre that has a lot of opportunity.”

De Menil partnered with DREAM Project, a nonprofit organization that did work in Cabarete, and launched Academia de Bachata in 2013. Since then, the school has provided hundreds of children with a free musical education.

“There were a lot of things we were trying to figure out along the way about what the best way to teach this music was because this wasn’t your typical conservatory. We were focusing on the traditions passed on rather than some style of music that there are already textbooks for.”

To make “Agridulce,” De Menil, who produced the film, reached out to Frank Pavich, director of the 2013 “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the cult classic documentary about avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s quixotic and failed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel “Dune.” It didn’t take much to bring him on onboard.

“Ben contacted me and told me about the project. I responded with what’s Bachata?,” the Croatian American director said. “I had never even heard of the musical genre. And then he sent me some music. He sent me footage that he had shot of [Cabarete] and of the school. And it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was so colorful and so incredible that I just wanted to jump on right away. I was like, ‘Great, when can we go down there and start shooting? It was really that fast.”

Pavich says now he hears bachata everywhere.

“I live between Switzerland and Croatia and now that I know how to pick it up, I hear it in cars passing by a cafe in Geneva and in Croatia,” he said. “It’s everywhere, it’s infiltrated everything in the best way possible.”

“Agridulce” is an ethnomusicological documentary — it captures the music of a specific place and people and shows how the tradition is kept alive — that also doubles as a coming of age story. The film follows students of varying ages — Edickson, Frandy, Orianny and Yerian — out of the classroom, showing us moments of intimacy with their families and friends while also giving us a slice of quotidian life in Cabarete.

As such, “Agridulce” doesn’t shy away from the political tensions of the beachside resort. Much like in the U.S., immigration is a contentious topic in the Dominican Republic — the country shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, which has seen an exodus of its people over the decade.

De Menil and Pavich said that nearly a third of Academia de Bachata’s student body is of Haitian descent, and that they would have had to go out of their way to not include one of them in the film.

This tension plays out in the storyline of Frendy, a magnetic student of Haitian descent who uses bachata to fit in.

“Many young people are in that position of being made to feel they don’t belong at that time in life when a person most wants to find their place,” De Menil said. “We see that music can help kids, particularly immigrant kids, find belonging.”

“The film ultimately speaks to the way that culture and shared history contribute to the development of authentic, lived creativity,” said South by Southwest consulting programmer Jim Kolmar. “It’s something innate and inevitable, and ‘Agridulce’ really explores that beautifully. Obviously it’s full of incredible music, but the deeper cultural context is essential, and seeing it through the perspective of the students at Academia de Bachata helps us connect the dots.”