nowhere in Africa

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Movie
Original title nowhere in Africa
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2001
length 141 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 10
Rod
Director Caroline Link
script Caroline Link
production Peter Herrmann
music Niki Reiser ,
Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock
camera Gernot Roll
cut Patricia Rommel
occupation

Nowhere in Africa is a German feature film by director Caroline Link from 2001 . The film is based on Stefanie Zweig's autobiographical novel of the same title, which was published six years earlier . The producer Peter Herrmann secured the rights to the material even before the book became a bestseller. Caroline Link shot it with great effort on location in Kenya . Nowhere in Africa was established in 2003 with an Oscar in the category Foreign Language Film Best excellent.

action

In 1938 the Jewish Redlich family fled the Nazi regime from the German Reich to Kenya with a young daughter . The former lawyer Walter Redlich works there as an administrator on a miserable British farm. His wife Jettel finds it difficult to get used to life in a completely different country. She has great difficulties with foreign languages ​​and the foreign cultural environment. In exile, the parents found out about the Nazi persecution against Jews all over Germany in November 1938 . Her daughter Regina, on the other hand, literally blossoms in the foreign country. She learns the language, is interested in the customs of the country and also successfully attends an English school. She finds a good fatherly friend in the cook Owuor. The marriage of the Redlichs is becoming increasingly difficult. After the two have slowly found each other again, they learn of the murder of Jettel's parents and Walter's father and sister in a concentration camp "in the east". Walter Redlich, who is now serving in the British Army, applies for a state job as a lawyer in destroyed Germany after the end of the war; he is then offered a judge's office. His wife would rather stay in Kenya. A plague of locusts threatens the village and their farm. In 1947 the Redlichs return to Germany, which has been badly damaged. Owuor goes to his family home. Jettel's final sentence in Kiswahili about an African woman selling fruit in the train station marks her situation and at the same time her love for this country after these eight years: “I can't buy anything, I'm poor as a monkey.” She receives a banana as a present.

background

Caroline Link was unable to attend the Academy Awards due to her daughter's illness. 23 years after the last German film received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film ( Die Blechtrommel ), Nirgendwo in Afrika won the same award, for which Caroline Link's debut film Jenseits der Stille was nominated in 1998 .

The small Kenyan village of Mukutani was the setting for the film. The crew around director Caroline Link founded the Mukutani Foundation in order to provide lasting help to the villagers even after the shooting was over. Together with World Vision they built a road to Mukutani.

In contrast to the feature film Out of Africa (1985), it does not tell a true story of an emigration to Kenya . The novel will not be filmed directly. In the film, however, there are many references to the historically documented situation of German Jews after 1933 and before the beginning of the mass extermination during the Second World War (separation from parents, notification of their death, financial worries, divorce, life of the Jewish community there, integration of the Subsequent generation in the new homeland, disputes with the previous homeland and the perpetrators living there up to the deployment as an Allied soldier). The Nazi persecution measures up to 1939 and the problems often associated with emigration from the German Reich are indicated realistically and emphasized dramatically.

Reviews

“The sensitively staged, extremely entertaining film benefits from well-tempered landscape shots, brisk dramaturgy, sensitive music and determined camera and editing. Thanks to excellent actors, he describes the years of emigration compassionately and without sentimental echoes. "

- film service

“Recommendable” “
Sensitive epic in grandiose pictures”
“Fun: 1/3; Action: 1/3; Erotic: 1/3; Voltage: 1/3; Claim: 2/3 "

- TV Movie 25/04

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable .

See also

Awards

Oscars 2003

Golden Globe Awards 2003

German Film Award 2002

Bavarian Film Award 2002

  • Audience award

literature

  • Caroline Link, Peter Herrmann: Adventure Africa. Experiences, stories and pictures . Langen Müller, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7844-2848-7 .
  • Stefanie Zweig : There was no home anywhere: my life on two continents . Langen Müller, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7844-3310-3 (The author's biography and various writings, such as her 1995 novel, may well serve as models for her script).
  • Christine Arendt: On the analysis of culture-reflective films and their reception in GFL lessons. “The Lives of Others” and “Nowhere in Africa”. Interpretation, narratology, memory rhetoric and reception by Italian students. (= Film, medium, discourse ), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2019. ISBN 978-3-8260-6636-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for nowhere in Africa . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , December 2001 (PDF; test number: 89 349 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for nowhere in Africa . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ^ Annual report 2002. World Vision Germany , archived from the original on July 29, 2010 ; Retrieved July 29, 2010 .