• "Where Hands Touch" is a movie starring Amandla Stenberg as a biracial girl living in Nazi Germany who becomes romantically involved with a member of the Hitler Youth.
  • It's being criticized for supposedly romanticizing a Nazi.
  • Director Amma Asante has vigorously defended the movie and denied that it says anything positive about the "disgusting and murderous" Nazi state.
  • She and Stenberg both say they wanted to carve out a story about Afro-Germans living under Nazi rule, though the movie is a work of fiction.
  • Viewers can decide if they succeed when the movie comes out this month.

The new trailer for "Where Hands Touch" — an upcoming fictional movie about a romance between a biracial girl and a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi-era Germany — is alarming fans and has caused some to question why the movie needs to exist in the first place.

"Where Hands Touch" is a coming-of-age tale about a Leyna, 15-year-old girl played by Amandla Stenberg, and her romance with Lutz, a Hitler Youth teen played by George MacKay, whose father is a prominent member of the Nazi party. It's a story of a forbidden romance — Afro-Germans were persecuted by the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws — with a backdrop of systemic murder.

Director Amma Asante, who is black, said on Twitter that the movie is a passion project that took more than a decade to research and write. She's previously directed two other critically acclaimed movies with interracial romances — "Belle" and "A United Kingdom" — and is herself in an interracial marriage.

Critics on Twitter think the whole thing is tasteless

But even fans of Asante and "Hunger Games" actress Stenberg are skeptical about the movie.

"It appears that [the romance] has some redemptive value for both people — that Lutz’s romantic attraction to a black girl will complicate a Nazism he just falls into on his account of his father," Anne Branigin wrote in The Root. "Given his position — as a white Aryan and as a Nazi — this also puts Lutz in a position to save Leyna should harm come her way. If this is the direction the movie goes in, it’s a disturbing one."

On Twitter, critics called out the movie for apparently romanticizing a Nazi, and for appearing to use the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust as a backdrop for a fictional love story.

Asante has been defending the project for more than a year

Asante has read this criticism before. She's been publicly defending the movie since February 2017, when Variety released a sneak preview of it, taking to Instagram to confront negative reactions.

In her lengthy Instagram comments, Asante vehemently denied the movie romanticizes Nazis, condemned the "disgusting and murderous" Nazi state, and said she partly made the film as a way to highlight growing "horrific racial and religious ignorance" and intolerance in more modern times. She said she interviewed Holocaust survivors before making the movie and visited sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.

amma asante
Amma Asante at the 2018 Roger Ebert Film Festival in Illinois.
Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images for Roger Ebert's Film Festival

In her comments, the director acknowledged that no groups suffered during the Holocaust as much as the Jewish people — 6 million of whom were systemically murdered by the Nazis — but said she also wanted to inform people about the "terrifying path" the Afro-German community negotiated in Nazi Germany.

"No matter how awful it was for people of color, the murder perpetrated against the Jews was so much worse because it was so large scale and operated as a machine," she wrote on Instagram. "If the story of Jewish people in Nazi Germany didn't matter to me then I would never have discovered children of color that existed alongside them."

where hands touch kiss
George MacKay and Amandla Stenberg in "Where Hands Touch."
Vertical Entertainment

Asante also denied that the movie was devised as a cynical ploy to romanticize Nazis, and said that such accusations show ignorance about what it takes to make a movie.

"If you honestly think a filmmaker chooses to make a film during the Holocaust to try and create sensationalism, [then] you have no real sense of what filmmaking on this kind of budget and these 'life' topics is," she wrote. "It took over a decade to earn my stripes before funding came to make it... All my films are sincerely told. The day I become cynical is the day throw the towel in."

She also defended her decision to include a romance between a biracial girl and a member of the Hitler Youth, saying he is just one part of Stenberg's path to self-discovery.

where hands touch amandla stenberg movie
Amandla Stenberg as a biracial girl in a concentration camp in the movie "Where Hands Touch"
Protagonist Pictures

Asante said she set the movie in 1944 because at that point, virtually everyone left alive in Berlin were white Germans, so every young person would have been a member of the Hitler Youth. With that setting, Asante could explore the impression Hitler left on young minds, she said.

"Amandla's character goes through all sorts of rites of passage experiences — love is only one of them," she wrote. "Since she is purely surrounded by German boys and girls, they are the only ones she could engage with, or I could shoot this film without her engaging with anyone at all since as a character of color she is isolated from that point of view."

Protagonist Pictures, the studio releasing the movie — which is also responsible for "Gotti" and the Kevin Spacey-starring "Billionaire Boys Club" — also seems conscious of the criticism. It uploaded a still of the movie on its site with the file name "Amma-released-to-counteract-NazieGate." Protagonist Pictures didn't immediately respond to INSIDER's request for comment.

Asante and Stenberg still stand by the movie

With the trailer's release, Stenberg — who also stars in "The Hate U Give" this fall — also publicly defended the movie.

She told Variety that she was drawn to the story because it was an opportunity to tell more expansive stories about black and biracial characters throughout history.

"People don’t really know that biracial children existed then," Stenberg said. "These biracial children were the children of French soldiers and German women who had fallen in love during World War I."

where hands touch intimate
An intimate scene between Amandla Stenberg and George MacKay in "Where Hands Touch."
Vertical Entertainment

Asante, too, explained to People that she wanted to create an unorthodox historical story. She cited her background, saying that "being born and raised in Europe, and of African descent" made her want to write a story about black people living under Hitler's rule.

And to be sure, there are people eagerly looking forward to the movie. The anticipation on Twitter sits side-by-side with the trepidation.

Stenberg also told Variety she wanted to challenge audiences by making a Holocaust-set movie that wasn't about Jews.

"I think it's challenging for people to conceive of a story about the Holocaust that is not centered around the Jewish experience, but the experience of someone else," Stenberg said. "But I think what the movie does really beautifully is it demonstrates what happens with these tricky intersections of identity and how we still continue to be human and love and be loved, despite that."

Telling a fictional story about the Holocaust is hard to pull off

Depicting the Holocaust in fictional stories has been a vexing moral problem for artists and critics. They raise immediate, urgent questions about representation, appropriation, and taste. And it is even harder to morally justify such stories when inventing a romance into a history filled with death and suffering.

"There is something ethically dubious, so the usual argument goes, about using — literally or figuratively profiting from — atrocity as an inspiration for literature, or indeed any form of art," Ruth Franklin, a scholar of Holocaust fiction, wrote in "A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction."

amandla stenberg where hands touch
Amandla Stenberg in "Where Hands Touch."
Vertical Entertainment

That's one of the potential problems with "Where Hands Touch." It's a work of fiction and isn't based on anyone's life in particular. There was a demographic known as the "Rhineland Bastards" — a derogatory term referring to the children of white German women and French soldiers of African descent who occupied Rhineland during World War I — who were forcibly sterilized by the Nazis. But Asante wove a fictional story from her research instead of making a narrative recreation of history.

These are all challenges Asante faced with the creation of "Where Hands Touch." But then again, it hasn't been released yet. It will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9 before hitting theaters in the US on September 14. Viewers won't know how successful she was until then.

Representatives for Asante and Stenberg did not immediately respond to INSIDER's request for comment.

Visit INSIDER's homepage for more.