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Interview: Director Amma Asante On ‘Where Hands Touch’

Back in 2005, British director Amma Asante came across a photograph of a black teenage girl. Taken in the 1940s in Nazi Germany, it stuck in her mind, made her ask a whole myriad of questions and marked the start of a long road to making Where Hands Touch, which is released in cinemas on Friday.

Inspired by that single photograph, it’s a story of survival. Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) mixed race and living in World War II Germany and, while she isn’t subjected to the same horrors as the Jewish population, she’s threatened with sterilisation and relationships with those of another race are forbidden. When she falls in love with Lutz (George MacKay), the son of a high ranking Nazi officer, life becomes more dangerous than she could ever have imagined.

Asante had originally planned to make the film back in 2009 and, talking to THN’s Freda Cooper, explains why the project was put on the back burner for so long – and how it was instrumental in her making Belle (2014). She also talks about her approach to writing and directing and looks forward to her next film, the Cold War set The Billion Dollar Spy.

Read the interview in full below.

Your films always come from a unique perspective. They often tell a little-known story as well. With When Hands Touch, it’s all about the treatment of the biracial victims of the Holocaust. What inspired you to tell that story? I gather there was a photograph?

Amma Asante: A photograph, absolutely. I originally began researching what my next project was going to be after my first film – A Way Of Life – and was specifically researching the area of Afro-Europeans – black Europeans – people from the African diaspora, but born and living in Europe. Because I don’t really know that much about other people like me, and as I was googling I kept coming across this photograph of this little girl – she’s dual heritage, obviously – she’s Afro-German. She’s standing amongst other schoolgirls; she’s about fourteen, I think, and she’s standing amongst other schoolgirls and her face is really unreadable.  I’ve had other people see the photo and say that she looks a little disconnected? But for me, she’s just – I couldn’t read anything. It’s a blank canvas and so I started to habitually started coming to a term that I found quite distressing – the term ‘Rhineland bastards’, and and I didn’t even really know where the Rhineland was, but it kept coming up with the connection to this term. Originally I just ignored the term but then I couldn’t anymore because her picture kept coming up with it. I thought ‘who is she?’ ‘What happened to her?’ ‘How is this photo taken in 1943?’ And, ‘how come she’s alive? How come she’s standing with other schoolgirls in 1943? The little I knew about the Holocaust, I knew that Berlin was supposed to have been cleared of Jewish people by Hitler’s birthday in 1943 so why was this black girl standing there?

Presumably all the other children in the photograph were Arian?

They were Arian and so from that literally came a stark understanding, for me, that these Afro-German children lived isolated, except surrounded by a world of literal white supremacy. What the picture also said to me in many ways, I suppose both from an intellectual and emotional point of view as well – we often think of integration as a good thing, and it is, you know, you move to Spain and you want to integrate with your local village of community or town that you’re living in. It’s a great thing, but when that integration is foisted upon you as a means of survival, there’s nobody else around you that looks like you – it’s persecution in isolation, not persecution within a community, and one is not better than the other, they’re just different. Then that integration that is foisted upon you is because it is about survival; because it is comes as an act of brutality; becomes a violent act – you don’t have any choices really. You might think you do, but you don’t have any choices because how do you survive without it? All Arian children at that time, it was mandatory to be in the Hitler Youth.

As is her brother?

As is her brother. So what do you do? I mean, when I then continued researching what I discovered, I think usually that Afro-Germans were the only group of people where I could find examples of images of them openly as Afro-German, not passing as anything else, so openly not Arian but wearing swastikas – fighting in the Nazi-German army and also in camps. So, their spectrum of experience was so complex and nuanced and complicated that it was quite overwhelming but sort of confounding of all of my assumptions; all of my thoughts because I was judging everything really through a gaze of day – the gaze of a black woman who, regardless of being raised in Europe, has been raised in a community, and that community has been both interracial and black at the same time. I’ve got friends who have had similar experiences to me as well as family. So I’ve had it within a community – anything that’s happened to me. If a teacher has said something to be that is not very nice, I’ve got friends that have experienced something similar. These Afro-German children didn’t necessarily have those other to go to.

They were treated differently.

From everyone.

There’s this whole business with sterilisation. Were they actually sent to concentration camps in the same way as Jews?

No.

Then I’ve obviously understood the film correctly because she’s in a labour camp, but next door is the concentration camp with the smoking chimney.

You’ve understood it bang on. So no, they weren’t. What we know and we’re very keenly aware of is Jews had a machine of murder that was utilised against them. That did not happen for Afro-German children, or people, even so far as putting people into labour camps. There was no machine in that way. It was [on] an individual basis – on a day-to-day basis. If you meet the wrong SS officer on the wrong day – that could be your fate. There was a reason for this. It was because their mothers were considered Arian, so that afforded them a level of protection, perhaps sometimes from death but not from persecution. So they were not treated like Jewish people – their treatment was to their terrible detriment – Arians, they had this space somewhere else and they were both insiders and outsiders. When Jewish people had been taken away from schools and taken away from society, there were some Afro-Germans that were still out there. They were still working in factories or part of the army, or going to school. So you’re influenced by the same cultural influences as everybody else that’s left but you’re not one of them. You’re an insider and outsider all at the same time.

A no-man’s land.

It is a no-man’s land, and I think for a child – for a teenage who’s coming of age and trying to find independence and pushing all the boundaries that we all did when we were growing up, but against this devastating backdrop, that was a really complex world because for them to quantify the danger, it was not quantifiable in the way that it was for Jewish people who began to discover that eventually, as word got passed along that this is what was happening in camps – that when you arrived at the camp you had an idea of what was going to happen to you – Afro-German children didn’t always. They knew there was persecution but the stakes were different because they couldn’t necessarily judge them as life and death.

And yet, despite that background, this film is a love story between Laina and Lutz who is the son of a high-ranking officer, and a member of the Youth movement himself.

All at once, the story of the radicalisation of a generation of German teenagers, and all at once the story of an Afro-German girl’s struggle to survive in Nazi Germany. All those things at once. The reason why I go off is because, in many ways, the love story is a tool to express so much of that. It’s a love story to express all of the rules that Afro-Germans fell under and everything that Laina goes on to defy. So, the Hitler decree that they should never have relationships outside of their race which, because you didn’t know any other Afro-Germans you were confined to a life on your own; that they should never have children – so he sterilised them; and that they should die out within one generation, and in this relationship, partly she’s able to defy so much of that. With her mother she’s able to defy the decree of being sterilised. She obviously enters into a relationship with a young German boy, and then she goes on to have a child and therefore, partly because Afro-Germans did defy – some of them were able to defy that decree – that’s part of the reason why we have Afro-Germans. Obviously there have been later migration and modern-day multi-cultural societies have also been born, but there descendants of Afro-Germans who are survivors of the Holocaust who were able to avoid being sterilised.

This is a film that you were originally planning to make in 2009, which means it would have come before Belle.

It would have, and there would have been no Belle. At all. It was meant to be my second film. I started researching it in 2005, which is when my second film came out. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought that if I put my head down and do the work I would eventually get it made. It was deemed too big for me. It was very different to my first film. My first film was obviously smaller and more documentary style, but it was still a drama and it still required big performances, and it was still dealing with big issues within our society. Men’s films are always deemed as transferable, whereas women have to show incrementally why they are appropriate to take that next giant step. So realising that I wasn’t getting the financing because I was getting moved over into this box of ‘why don’t you do something closer to your first film?’ I thought: I’m not an activist, I’m not a politician – I could never make movies if I was. [I thought] tell me what the rules are. Tell me what the obstacles are, and let me find a way to negotiate them, and what I discovered was that I really had to prove that I had the chops to direct it and the only way to do that was to direct other films that they would let me make. I tried to direct films that had showed why I was the right person to direct Where Hands Touch, and therefore that meant movies that did have political backdrops and intimate stories, were period, because that was the big jump, really; creating worlds of past, and proving that I could do that authentically. So I did Belle and A United Kingdom, and I got half the money for Where Hands Touch when I did Belle, and then I got the other half, more or less, when I did A United Kingdom.

Given that gap, and the films that you made, is there an argument that actually this was the right time to make the film anyway?

I think that it was. I think there’s never been a better time for this film to come out. What this film is about, to a large extent, is what happens when you are a developing mind and the world around you is designed to radicalise you. How do you find your moral code? For all of us, there’s a great necessity for us to know what our moral code it today. What do we stand up for? What don’t we?  What do we stand by and watch happen? Even though we know it is wrong. How do we cope with circumstances, situations that make us uncomfortable? They’re inconvenient? We don’t like inconvenience as a set of people and I mean that in terms of life and death situations that existed. People in Nazi Germany didn’t speak up for all kinds of reasons, and so it resonated in 2005 but for sure it resonates even more now. The thing about something when it resonates – sometimes that will get you into trouble as well – but I’m really happy that now is the time because in the right quarters and the right conversations are being had and that’s amazing.

This is a film that you’ve written as well as directed, and that isn’t something that you normally do. How do you combine the two? Are they very separate or one extended role for you?

No, not really. Actually A United Kingdom is the only film that I’ve not written. I still did drafts of it, but I would say those drafts were definitely as a director as opposed to as a writer. I lost my entire credit for writing everything on Belle.

How come?

To the Guild in the U.S. Somebody else had tried to write something based on the painting previously and the key was that it was the same producer that was trying to get it off of the ground so, according to Guild rules, it was deemed as the same project. So, A United Kingdom is really the only one that I would say that I haven’t come to as a writer. I do see [the two roles] as different. I think that when you watch the films you’ll feel it, because when I write the scripts myself it’s an insider’s point of view, and you’ll feel that, that you’re walking in the shoes of the protagonist. Even The Way Of Life which was about a girl living in a sink town in Wales – it was still an insider’s point of view [from which] I wrote that. I saw the world through he gaze and through he eyes. For something like A United Kingdom, which was written by somebody else – yes I did do work on the script – I definitely came at it as a kind of observer. I’m a voyeur looking in and watching how this couple are to navigate and negotiate an empire – two continents and three countries…

Tantrum Films/UMedia

Is that because there are two people at the centre of it, whereas with Belle it’s really one – and indeed with this one?

No. I think it’s because when another writer creates the seeds to the piece, the building blocks are different – the early building blocks are very different. If I had come to A United Kingdom as writer those early building blocks would have been quite different. One isn’t better or worse than the other, they’re just different, and ‘he’ walks in their shoes and I am observing them – I am very close to them and I want you to be as the audience as well. We’re the third person in that relationship. Because, I could have easily, as a woman who is also black, I could have walked in Rosamund [Pike’s] shoes in that story. But also as a black person who’s African, whose parents were born into a colonial country, a country that was colonised in that they saw become independent, I could have also seen it through David Oyelowo’s eyes, quite strongly, and actually I just saw it as the observer who rooted for them.

Coming up next a Cold War story?

Yes, written by Ben August. A wonderful writer [It’s called] Billion Dollar Spy. It is based on a book by David E. Hoffman who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. It is an amazing book. It’s another true story and another one of those books that we have to adapte where I can only read eighteen pages in a day, or could, because they’re so dense. There’s so much in them to take in. Again, it’s another story that’s about an intimate relationship between two people, in this case it’s two men – A C.I.A. agent and the Russian spy that he is running, basically in Cold War Germany in 1977. [It’s set] against that hyper-political backdrop that existed at that time, so again contextualised by the politics and the society.

Have you cast it yet?

A little bit. I’ve got one of the characters, but I can’t tell you. He’s a wonderful, wonderful actor and I’m really looking forward to it.

So, when do you start shooting?

We’re looking towards the end of the first quarter of next year. I’m determined that we will have real snow and we won’t have to have a snow-making machine.

Make your actors suffer.

We will too. We suffer more than they do because we’re there every single day and they have days off. It’ll be fine, but yes, I’, really looking forward to it.

Where Hands Touch is now playing.

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