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Germany’s Nowhere in Africa, an Oscar nominee for this year’s Best
Foreign Language Film, is a beautifully shot film about a Jewish
family that flees to Kenya from Germany at the start of World War
II. In the true story the family must struggle not only with adapting
to a completely different world while war rages back home but they
also must struggle with changes and priorities within their close
family unit. Jettel Redlich, played by Aimee and Jaguar’s Juliane
Kohler, is a well-to-do wife who takes her daughter to join her
husband on a farm in Kenya, fleeing the hatred of Germany. While
she struggles with the change of environment and culture, her husband,
played by Merab Ninidze, tries his best to build the family a home
in Kenya.
The award-winning true story spans a time period of almost ten
years. The most interesting aspect of the film is the development
over those years of Kohler’s character as her priorities and worldview
change. While her husband struggles with his need to have his own
country and home, the wife is slowly but surely redeveloping her
own place in life with Kenya as her country and home. Lea Kurka
is delightful to watch as the couple’s five-year old daughter who
adapts to the change well with a child’s innocence. The girl quickly
adopts Kenya, its people and their culture as her own and learns
to negotiate herself within a world of change.
While the film is well done with beautiful cinematography of the
Kenyan landscape and excellent character development, there is a
part of me that was averse to watching a film in which, once again,
the black folks are the strange “other”. Of course, this film softens
the neo-colonial blows with a seemingly positive respect of the
Pokot people and their traditions but, for those viewers that watch
with a cynical eye, it is off-putting to know that the premise of
the film is if the persecuted yet privileged family can survive
in the underprivileged world of Africa.
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