Much of the dialogue in Caroline Link’s 1997 Best Foreign Film nominee Jenseits der Stille/Beyond Silence was silent (the heroine’s parents are deaf-mute), so she’s compensated in her 2002 Best Foreign Film winner Nirgendwo in Afrika/Nowhere in Africa by giving almost all the characters their own voiceover narration. Dominant is that of Regina (played as a child by a splendid Lea Kurka and as a teen by a bland Karoline Eckertz), a shy five-year-old Jewish girl in 1938 Germany who can’t stand up to a visitor’s dachshund, never mind the growing power of the Third Reich. She and mother Jettel (Juliane Köhler from Aimee und Jaguar) flee to join father Walter (Merab Ninidze) in Kenya, where the primitive local culture and harsh conditions over several years cause Regina to blossom and her parents’ marriage to wither.

Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel has more grit than Sydney Pollack’s potboiled version of Out of Africa, with which it shares many plot points and stylistic affectations. But Zweig is no Karen Blixen, at least in Link’s version: the characters are not far removed from stereotype (the family’s Kenyan cook, whom Regina adores, comes across as a tall, lean, male mammy), the issues of the Holocaust and of Jewishness in general seem tagged on, and the simmering sexuality is only superficially exploited. Regina is said to have a " negro " heart possessing the wisdom of Africa, but in the end all she has to offer are the same old clichés. In English, German, and Swahili with English subtitles. (140 minutes)