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.