Nowhere in Africa, Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001)
Winner of the 2002 Oscar for “Best Foreign Film”
In German and Swahili with English subtitles
Written and Directed by Caroline Link
After the autobiographical novel by Stefanie ZweigIf any movie is set anywhere, anytime in Africa, there’s a good chance I’ve made every attempt to see it. From my first date with my husband 27 years ago to see The Gods Must Be Crazy – except for Lion King – I’ve seen it all: from Hatari and Mogambo to Out of Africa and I Dreamed of Africa. This explains my recent purchase for $1.00 of the DVD Nabongo(1944) “a tale of a downed airplane in the jungles of Africa, and the pilot’s daughter, now a fully-grown woman, protected by a mammoth gorilla.”
Many safari people love any story, in print or motion pictures, that takes place in Africa. If that’s your case, here’s a movie you should know about.
I first saw compelling shorts from Nowhere in Africa during the 2002 Academy Awards, where it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, then stood on line in the snow at the movies. Now there’s the DVD to enjoy at home on the sofa.
Filmed in the 2,300-meter high dry scrubland 120 kms north of Nairobi, the setting is the isolated farmlands of Kenya, 1938 to 1947. Realizing that time is running out for them, a well-to-do German-Jewish family take the last escape route out of Nazi Germany, abandoning home, family, and the creature comforts and intellectual assumptions of European society for the promise of Africa. Speaking no English, they have to find their places in this totally unfamiliar culture and unforgiving landscape. And they change.
Every marriage is a saga, and this one is no different. Let’s just say that Juliane Köhler (a German Diane Keaton) gives a sensitive performance as Jettel and is a pleasure to look at during her transformation from spoiled wife yearning for a family and homeland that no longer exist to a self-reliant, Africanized settler after her husband is interred as an alien in British East Africa.
There is hardly a giraffe or lion in the entire film, and the one shooting scene is fairly pathetic. Still, it’s a fact that Zweig’s family ate the corn porridge of the Africans rather than shoot game to eat.
Yet Africa is omnipresent in this film. Owuor, the mpishi (cook) who befriends the five-year-old Kurka – whose initiation to Africa begins the moment she draws in her first deep whiff of Owuor’s different scent – is a very real personality for anyone who has known the matter-of-fact acceptance of such Africans. To assure the film’s authenticity, for the filming of Kikuyu rites that have since disappeared, Link located enough elders still alive to describe and enact them.
Deciding not to film in South Africa with Zulus speaking English while playing Kikuyus, Link admits to experiencing both the wonders of Kenya as well as the unrelenting pressures of corruption with everyone wanting their little piece of the take-cake. The film team consisted of 100 people living in 86 tents, plus a staff of 22, plus 12 security guards and 14 cooks during the 52 days of shooting, along with up to 150 Nairobi extras.
Part of the deal to the local communities where the film was made was for the company to build a 40-km improved road, which not only made the making of the film possible, but also made a tangible contribution to the people there.
In sum, Nowhere in Africa is a kind of Sopranos of “The Displacement of a Bourgeois German-Jewish Family To An Isolated Farm in Kenya, circa 1938-1947.” It’s a slice of life in Africa rarely – if ever – portrayed, and I never found the 138-minute film too long. The original book is surely as good, if not better.