When you have a story as powerful as this it's almost impossible to strike no emotional tone. But Nirgendwo in Afrika / Nowhere in Africa succeeds in just that through a mechanical adaptation to screen, mechanical direction and mechanical acting. There are few scenes that take this to a higher level and tons of missed opportunities. Take the grasshopper plague where the family more or less reunites or the whole African setting compared to Europe at that time: No parallels are drawn. Reading letters is not the way to convey heavy emotions to the audience. Caroline Link is the main suspect here because she fails in bringing this to a coherent movie. It's also overlong and moves unnecessarily slow probably to tell something about time passing, but again there are better cinematic ways of doing this.
Beautiful panorama shots of the African landscape so I do advice to see this on the big screen if you can. And the two Reginas Lea Kurka and Karoline Eckertz are very adorable. Most intriguing character in the story is Jettel who is tossed around by her emotions and is in the beginning less an adult than her own child. The wider story here is about problems arising from adaptation to new circumstances.
This movie received an Oscar for best foreign film. My guess is that had more to do with the subject than with the adaptation as shown by the undeserved one for De Aanslag / The Assault some years earlier. As usual the Academy had no interest in real film-making, as Ying Xiong / Hero was nominated in the same year and category.
Germany's role in current cinema is diminished severely the last decade in favor of the Spanish and the Danish. Gone are the days of Fassbinder, Herzog or Schlöndorff. But luckily they still have the enormous talent of Tom Tykwer. Nothing mechanical about his movies.
Beautiful panorama shots of the African landscape so I do advice to see this on the big screen if you can. And the two Reginas Lea Kurka and Karoline Eckertz are very adorable. Most intriguing character in the story is Jettel who is tossed around by her emotions and is in the beginning less an adult than her own child. The wider story here is about problems arising from adaptation to new circumstances.
This movie received an Oscar for best foreign film. My guess is that had more to do with the subject than with the adaptation as shown by the undeserved one for De Aanslag / The Assault some years earlier. As usual the Academy had no interest in real film-making, as Ying Xiong / Hero was nominated in the same year and category.
Germany's role in current cinema is diminished severely the last decade in favor of the Spanish and the Danish. Gone are the days of Fassbinder, Herzog or Schlöndorff. But luckily they still have the enormous talent of Tom Tykwer. Nothing mechanical about his movies.