Islands

Jan-Ole Gerster's Islands opened in 2025 and was nominated for the Lola Award for Best Film, alongside winning the Lola for Best Score (David Schwarz). The film consolidated Gerster, after his earlier A Coffee in Berlin (2012) and Lara (2019), as one of the most distinctive contemporary German directors of his generation, and continued his characteristic register of slow-burning character studies anchored by central male performances of unusual restraint.

The film follows a tennis coach working at an upmarket Fuerteventura resort hotel, whose carefully constructed life (the predictable rhythms of coaching, the unobtrusive friendships with hotel staff and regular guests, the absence of substantial intimate connection) is disrupted when one of the resort's guests suddenly disappears. The film moves between his daily routine on the island, his interactions with the missing guest's family, and his slowly emerging interior register across the days that follow.

Gerster's commitment to a register of slow-burn character study (long static shots, restrained pacing, the absence of conventional dramatic emphasis) produced one of the most quietly affecting recent works of contemporary German cinema. Frank Lamm's photography of the Fuerteventura coastline, the resort interiors, and the broader Atlantic light, alongside Schwarz's award-winning score, anchor a film whose tonal commitment is unusually sustained.