Product: Nowhere in Africa (2003)
Rating: 5.0
Culture Shock
This very fine film about a family (man, wife and daughter) of German Jews who escape the Holocaust by emigrating to Africa, wonderfully evokes the shock of their being thrust into an alien land and culture and their various responses to and difficulties adjusting to the strangeness of it all.Beautifully filmed, with some of the best views of that landscape since Out of Africa, these are complex people with complicated responses to their situation. The father, a lawyer, resents having to be a hired hand on English-owned Kenyan farms and ranches. His wife hates the loss of wealth, privelege and the hardships of their new circumstances. They both miss and worry about the families left behind in Germany. Meanwhile, their young daughter, with the flexibility and adaptability of a child, takes to the people and the land right away and becomes more African than European in her sensiblity.Played with subtlety and restraint, the emotions and conflicts generated within and without the marriage are complicated and ring true. For that fact, the whole film rings true and creates its truths by accumulation of detail and the gradual revealing of character. We come to know and understand these complicated people.Well worthwhile, this is fine work in all departments. I don't know if it's a classic, but it is at least 4-1/2 stars.