Nowhere in Africa (2001)

There is no doubt that this movie has a number of pluses. Most importantly, it honestly looks at a unique situation concerning World War II and the persecution of Jews by Hitler. This Jewish family which escaped Nazi Germany only finds themselves trapped in the vagaries of World War II, which follows them to Africa. I will not go into the plot, but it is well developed with wonderful acting, cinematography, directing and a perfect musical score. This has become one of my favorites and certainly deserved the awards it one, including Best Foreign Film, and was certainly a much more entertaining film than "Chicago," which one the Best Film at the Academy Awards in 2003.

When I think of all the rubbish on film, the well-intentioned films which didn't quite pull it off, the unnecessary changes to books which would have done quite well being left alone, and the trashy melodramatic treatment of many stories set during WWII, it is a great relief to come across a film which not only appears totally authentic but holds one's attention throughout.The Kenya locations coupled with the use of local actors speaking in their own languages makes this film a stand out. The story of the educated upper middle class family uprooted from everything they knew in Germany and forced to cope with unaccustomed poverty as they start over in a totally different land among people speaking a different language is itself heartrending, especially as they were cut off from their families and comfortable civilized life as they knew it, and knew that they could not go back. They are forced to make a new life among the Africans, whom they must have regarded as illiterate and uncultivated, yet it is the Africans who accept them as they adjust to life in Kenya.This is not the Kenya of White Mischief, or Out of Africa, which showed the lives of the better off settlers. This is the Kenya of lonely isolated farms where life is primitive and hard.Everything about this film is superb, the acting, the story, the locations. One can watch it again and again without tiring of it.

I have seen some wonderful foreign films, but I watched the film Nirgendwo in Afrika recently, and it is truly one of the very best films I have seen in a long time.Nowhere in Africa (the English title) is a German film about a Jewish family who flee from the Nazi regime at the very last moment before it is too late to a remote farm in Kenya. The film is in English, Swahili and German, and the acting from all concerned is truly outstanding and very touching. The cinematography is also amazing, and the music score is so fantastic that I absolutely have to buy it.The film avoids over-sentimentality, and instead tells this true tale based on Stefanie Zweig's autobiographical novel with heart-felt realism.The German family leave their country and their relatives to save their lives. The wife is unsure of the 'negroes' in Africa and expects them to learn German if they want to speak to her, but learns that difference in culture and skin colour is important and special. The young daughter grows up loving the country and forgetting what Germany was like; she embraces the African people most out of the three, especially the family cook. The husband ends up volunteering to join the British army to fight against the Germans. The English school that the girl goes to separates the Jews from the other pupils so that they can pray in assembly. The family end up speaking three languages, and ultimately need to decide at the close of the war whether or not they wish to go back and help build up the new Germany.There is so much more to this film; I only want to show on a basic level all its layers and complexities. It is a wonderful study of human-nature and human-kind.

Having recently done research on Grandparents who left Berlin in 1939 for exile in Denmark, I found this film relevant and moving at times. I remember my mother telling me about how my father reacted in horror when he received a letter telling of his mother's (another grandparent) abduction from Norway to Auschwitz. This reaction is mirrored poignantly in the film.There could be similar films about the many German Jews who escaped at the last moment to Shanghai, for instance. They ended in that foreign environment mainly because Hamburg, which coveted its semi-independence and kept a distance from the Nazis, had quasi-diplomatic relations with the Chinese port and obtained visas. As I recall, the family of former Treasury secretary Michael Blumenthal spent the war in Shanghai.Weaknesses of the film: The strange title. Nowhere ??? in Africa? In fact, the husband early on establishes roots in Africa, and by the end of the film the wife and daughter have deep roots there. Why belittle Kenya and its people? The hint of antisemitism among the British. Yes, the British have a tradition of antisemitism but nothing even close to the state-sponsored horror perpetrated by the Germans. The love triangle involving Susskind. Not needed, really. Enough else is going on.The wife willingly has sex to get the husband a job. Ouch. Another cliché we don't really need.The wife says she's pregnant. The husband merrily asks, Is it due to me? Ouch, ouch. Would have been nice twist if African cook were responsible. Anyway, the pregnancy is tossed in as some sort of cliché, the importance of which is not worth figuring out.The wife is a little too prissily German Jewish when she arrives in Kenya. By then, the Nazi horror was in full swing, and the blissful days eating Schlagsahne at the Konditorei were pretty much over. A sense of impending tragedy was foreign to only the most total twit, though many Germans of Jewish ancestry could not take the final step to leave the country they loved.Hearing Hitler speak on the radio, the wife early on feels comforted to being connected to Germany. Yeah, sure. That is totally removed from reality. Irresponsibly suggests that maybe German Jews were responsible for their tragedy.The Africans are too childlike, too noble, too subservient. There was African nationalism already in the 1930s.The husband returns in 1947 to be a judge in Wiesbaden. Highly unlikely. Virtually no Jews returned that early. The very great majority never returned. His return somehow lessens the horror of the Nazi years. The filmmaker seems to be trying to sugarcoat the real horror, much of it emanating from the true character of the Germans.Sorry, but in some ways the director treats the Africans of Kenya like the Nazis treated the Jews, as low-level outsiders. Would have been interesting to match newsreel footage on Nazi terror and horrors with movie's footage on Kenya animal sacrificae, to show that former is perverted, latter rooted in religion.Sort of a repellent and repulsive film on reflection. Excellent for portraying the perverted German psyche, however, as exhibited by the film maker. Tied for dishonor of being Worst Film on Holocaust Ever with "Sophie's Choice," another abomination. "Night and Fog" and "The Sorrow and the Pity" are among many worthy films on the Holocaust.