Goodbye Berlin

Fatih Akin's Goodbye Berlin (Tschick) opened in 2016 and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director and the Bambi Award. It is adapted from Wolfgang Herrndorf's bestselling 2010 young-adult novel of the same name; Herrndorf, who died in 2013, had become one of the most celebrated German novelists of his generation. The film carries on Akin's interest in Turkish-German youth identity, which 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), new to the class, unkempt, undisciplined and sharply observant, turns up at his door with a wrecked, stolen Lada Niva and an idea: drive south to Wallachia, the Romanian region Tschick's family comes from, with no maps and no licences. The film follows their road trip across the German countryside, the unlikely friendships they make on the way, and the slow opening of Maik's inner life.

Akin plays it as teenage road-movie picaresque (long East German country roads, eccentric villagers, the broad-comic logistics of underage driving in a stolen car), and it is one of the warmest films he has made. Both teenage leads were newcomers and both are remarkable: Göbel and Batbileg carry the film with a charm few later German adaptations of young-adult fiction have matched.