In the Fade

Fatih Akin's In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) won Diane Kruger the Best Actress prize at Cannes 2017, her first major prize in a decade, and took the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018. It continued Akin's long engagement with Turkish-German life in the present day, and with the political and social pressures that bear on second-generation immigrants in Germany.

In Hamburg's St. Georg neighbourhood, Katja Sekerci (Kruger), a German woman married to the Kurdish-German Nuri, loses her husband and their young son to a nail-bomb attack at Nuri's small business. The investigation, the prosecution and the trial of the suspects, a young neo-Nazi couple identified by the German federal investigators, take up the second and third acts of the film. Denis Moschitto plays Katja's lawyer, Danilo Fava, and Numan Acar plays Nuri in flashback.

The film is divided into three chapters, The Family, The Trial and The Sea, and each shifts register as Katja moves through a different stage of her grief. Its release coincided with continuing public argument in Germany about the handling of the real NSU (National Socialist Underground) prosecution, which had concluded with disappointing results in 2017. Akin's film became a regular reference point in that argument, which is part of why it landed with such force at home.