Product: Nowhere in Africa (2003)
Rating: 5.0
A Very Moving and Artfully Made Film
NOWHERE IN AFRICA certainly deserves the Academy Award for Foreign Film 2002 it won. This is an epic story about the human condition that transcends even the semibiographical time it addresses. In short, a happy and well-to-do German family (who happen to be Jewish, mostly in name only) 'escape' to Africa in 1938 just as Hitler is beginning to unfurl his blanket of the Holocaust. The father has proceeded the mother and daughter to find a place to live and a means of support. He is aided (importantly) by a native cook named Owuor (the symbol of universal mankind and spirit) in creating a home away from Germany. The basic theme of the story is how the transplanted Germans adjust to their new home, how the mother (not at all happy about giving up the good life in Germany to dwell among the natives whom she considers inferior people) attempts to inculcate her young daughter on how to stay separate from these 'dirty,untrustworthy' lower caste types. The daughter immediately relates to the gentle Owuor and falls in love with her new life. Matters drive husband and wife apart, they eventually are 'detained' (by the British who see them as Germans not unlike what the US did to the Japanese in WW II)in a camp which for all the world looks like a luxury hotel - without a sense of home. The husband joins the military and eventually the family moves back to their litlle home in the wilderness, survive locusts and famine, and through many trials find each other again. The bite to this film comes mostly from the mother's attitutde towards the Africans: it mirrors the attitude of the Nazis toward the Jews in Germany. How that bite is resolved contains some of the more sensitive movie making in a long time.The cast is uniformly excellent: Juliane Kohler and Merab Ninidje as the parents, Sidede Onyulo as Owuor, and the two actors who share the role of Regina the daughter - Lea Kurka and Karoline Eckertz. The film is tightly and lovingly directed by Caroline Link, making the most of the vastness and beauty of Kenya. Truly a film to see and see again. In German and African languages with excellent subtitles.