Nowhere In Africa
(2001)
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NOWHERE IN AFRICA is the story of a Jewish family who escape Nazi Germany at the last opportunity to live on a farm in remote Kenya. It charts the contrasting attitudes of Regina and her parents towards their new life and the poverty and isolation of their new home. DVD extras include an interview with the author of NOWHERE IN AFRICA, Stefanie Zweig. |
Writer/director Caroline Link has composed a love letter to Africa with this visually stunning and immaculately acted drama. Based on the autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, it's the emotional tale of a family of German-Jewish refugees who settle on a remote farm in Kenya in 1938. Against a landscape that can be cruel as well as beautiful, Jettel and Walter Redlich (Juliane Köhler and Merab Ninidze), and their five-year-old daughter Regina, struggle to adjust and survive. The winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, Link's drama delivers fresh insight into the Jewish experience of that era. Despite the setting, it's very much a Holocaust story, for no matter where the Redlichs go, prejudice and intolerance are always bubbling beneath the surface. However, this is no tragedy, nor are its characters victims — they are rounded individuals who provide a striking, and often ironic, portrait of the tenacity of the human spirit.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Engaging account of an unlooked-for colonial adventure, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, and encompassiing marital problems and homesickness along the way.