In the Fade

Fatih Akin's In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) won Diane Kruger the Best Actress prize at Cannes 2017 — Kruger's first major prize in a decade — and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018. The film consolidated Akin's continuing engagement with the contemporary Turkish-German experience and the broader political-social pressures on second-generation immigrants in Germany.

In Hamburg's St. Georg neighbourhood, Katja Sekerci (Kruger) — a German woman married to the Kurdish-German Nuri — has her life shattered when her husband and their young son are killed in a nail-bomb attack at Nuri's small business. The investigation, the prosecution, and the courtroom trial of the suspects (a young neo-Nazi couple identified by the German federal investigations agency) form the second and third acts of the film. Denis Moschitto plays Katja's lawyer Danilo Fava; Numan Acar plays Nuri in flashback sequences.

The film is structured in three formal chapters — The Family, The Trial, and The Sea — each shifting register as Katja moves through different stages of her processing of the loss. The film's release coincided with a continuing public conversation in Germany about the handling of the actual NSU (National Socialist Underground) prosecution that had concluded with disappointing results in 2017; Akin's film became a continuing reference point in that political-cultural conversation.