In her latest movie, Amandla Stenberg portrays a mixed-raced teenage girl living in Nazi Germany who comes face to face with the atrocities of the Holocaust.
“Where Hands Touch,” reads the film’s official synopsis, “is a coming of age story set in the most brutal of times: Germany, 1944. Leyna (Stenberg), the 15-year old daughter of a white German mother (Abbie Cornish) and a black African father, meets Lutz (George MacKay), a compassionate member of the Hitler Youth whose father (Christopher Eccleston) is a prominent Nazi solider, and they form an unlikely connection in this quickly changing world. As Leyna’s mother strives to protect her from the horrors that she could face as a mixed-race German citizen, Leyna is forced to forge her own path as the war goes on and the Nazis increase their atrocities over the Jews and all dissidents. Can she find an ally in Lutz, himself battling a fate laid out before him that he is hesitant to embrace?”
As Stenberg outlined in a recent interview with Variety, the experience of biracial people in Nazi Germany isn’t something that’s been commonly depicted onscreen.
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“We lack a range of the experience of black people throughout history, let alone a story about someone who is biracial,” Amandla said. “People don’t really know that biracial children existed then. These biracial children were the children of French soldiers and German women who had fallen in love during World War I.”
As Stenberg explained, her character “is experiencing racism and persecution, which ends up leading to her being sent to a concentration camp where she lives an experience parallel to that of Romani people or disabled people or mentally ill people or outcasts — those who were not Jewish and were not sent to extermination camps, but were persecuted and forced to work… that’s where those biracial children were sent at that time.”
She added: “I think it’s challenging for people to conceive of a story about the Holocaust that is not centered around the Jewish experience, but the experience of someone else. But I think what the movie does really beautifully is it demonstrates what happens with these tricky intersections of identity and how we still continue to be human and love and be loved, despite that.”
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“Where Hands Touch” will premiere a the Toronto International Film Festival before arriving in theatres on Sept. 14.
