Goodbye Berlin

Fatih Akin's Goodbye Berlin (Tschick) opened in 2016 and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director and the Bambi Award. Adapted from Wolfgang Herrndorf's 2010 bestselling young-adult novel of the same name — the late Herrndorf, who died in 2013, had become one of the most-celebrated German novelists of his generation — the film consolidated Akin's continuing engagement with Turkish-German youth identity that had shaped Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, and his other earlier work.

At the start of the summer holidays, lonely fourteen-year-old Maik (Tristan Göbel) is left to his own devices in a sleepy Berlin suburb. His Russian-German classmate Tschick (Anand Batbileg) — newly arrived in Maik's class, unkempt, undisciplined and quietly observant — turns up at his door with a wrecked, stolen Lada Niva and an idea: drive south to Wallachia, the Romanian region of Tschick's family, with no maps or licences. The film follows their road trip across the German countryside, the unlikely friendships they form en route, and the slow opening of Maik's interior life.

Akin's commitment to a register of teenage road-movie picaresque — long East German rural roads, encounters with eccentric villagers, the broad-comic logistics of underage stolen-car driving — produced one of the warmest works of his career. The performances of the two teenage leads, both newcomers, are remarkable; Göbel and Batbileg anchor the film with a charm that few subsequent German YA-source adaptations have matched.