Nowhere in Africa [2001]

Nowhere in Africa, based on the best-selling autobiographical novel of the same name, is a tale of love lost and found, an epic account of a young girl’s journey from wide-eyed innocence to reluctant maturity, and a reevaluation of the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘roots’. Walter, a farsighted German-Jewish lawyer, who gets inkling about the impending pogroms against Jews, manages to get his beautiful wife Jettel and daughter Regina emigrated to Kenya – a country filled with pristine beauty but culturally and economically at complete odds with their former homeland. Though Jettel initially finds it extremely difficult to adapt to their radically different lifestyle (and later her acceptance of the place occurs parallely with her growing sexual frustrations), Regina gets mesmerized by the place and its people the day she arrives and strikes up an especially touching friendship with their good-natured cook Owuor. Caroline Link, the film’s director, has managed to bring forth the depths and the various emotions at play in her finely-realised, three-dimensional and utterly human characters, through a tone that is filled as much with empathy as with the book’s sad remembrances for those turbulent few years in world history. The movie boasts of captivating photography, and fine performances in front of the camera.








Director: Caroline Link
Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Biopic/Romance
Language: German
Country: Germany