Growing up means seeing the world differently. Sometimes that awakening is painful. Sometimes the unfamiliar becomes exactly what you needed.
Amrum (7/8)
Twelve-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) is a summer resident of the dune-swept northern German island of Amrum, a patch of land so small that an aerial shot of the entire island fits neatly within one of the film’s opening frames. It is nearing the end of World War II, and despite the fact that the Nazi flag still proudly flies outside his family’s home and his mother fiercely defends the Führer while waiting for her soldier husband to come home, many of the islanders know that Germany’s fight is coming to an end. Nanning is young enough to parrot the party line (after all, he is a member of the Hitler Youth’s Jungvolk) but mature enough to begin sensing that the world order—and his family’s place within it—may soon be changing. The look of Amrum is gorgeous and, for me, somewhat startling, as I immediately recognized the North Sea landscape; the actual island lies close to Denmark, where my grandparents lived (and I visited as a kid). The details and sense of place—from the one-armed young baker, to the hostility the year-round locals show toward the summer visitors, to Nanning’s harrowing trip to visit his uncle on a neighboring island by pushing a bike across the mudflats at low tide—create a completely immersive world seen through the boy’s eyes. As a result, something as simple as Nanning’s quest to find white bread with butter and honey for his ailing, depressed mother gradually becomes an epic journey of innocence lost.
Valentina (6/8)
Described as a hybrid of narrative and documentary filmmaking (most of the people and places are real, though Valentina herself is not), the film follows a young woman named Valentina (Kayla Monterroso Mejia) as she navigates everyday life in El Paso, Texas. As a border city with a large immigrant population, El Paso is also a place where many people are trapped in cycles of poverty. Valentina herself is Mexican American: a young woman with a huge smile, charm to spare, and parking tickets burying her in debt. The camera follows her through mostly unscripted encounters as she cobbles together one-off jobs; hangs out with her friends and family; chats with friendly, hard-working Central American immigrants at a local café; and gradually finds that her frustrations with the system are pushing her toward activism. By the film’s end, she is speaking before the City Council, railing against the unchecked power of profiteering collection companies—in this case OmniBase—that trap struggling people under fines they can never realistically pay off. Monterroso Mejia is a real find. Not only is she smart and creative, but she’s also a hoot, coming across as genuinely warm and engaging to everyone around her. That warmth makes her mounting frustrations feel completely relatable. Fictional or not, a young woman like Valentina feels believable as someone who could genuinely become a fighter for change as she finds her voice.
Camp (6/8)
In a completely different kind of coming of age film, Emily (Zola Grimmer) is reeling from a couple horrific, tragic accidents, so her patient dad suggests that she goes off to a summer camp to be a counselor for troubled kids. When she arrives, she’s caught off-guard that it’s a “God camp,” but perhaps more surprised that most of the counselors, including a tight-knit group of girls, are hard-partiers that scoff at the camp’s religious earnestness. Quickly absorbed into the girls’ clique, Emily finds an easy comfort with them, so is relatively unfazed (after all she’s been through) to discover that her new friends are actually a coven of witches. As they pull her into their world, sequences often unfurl like dreams, and Camp never fully tells you what is real and what is not. Self-medicating with heavy drinking, Emily herself is an unreliable witness. What she does know, however, is that this newfound acceptance finally allows her grief to crack open, letting her fall into the embrace of whatever it is these girls are offering. Grimmer’s quietly broken, soulful performance anchors the wild, witchy premise, and writer/director Avalon Fast’s intriguing style will be exciting to watch develop.
Part of Moviepie’s coverage of the 2026 Seattle International Film Festival.
