German Film Nominated for Oscar
February 15, 2003
This week, the German film industry had reason to celebrate: Nowhere in Africa, German director Caroline Link's latest film, received an Oscar nomination.
A love story spanning two continents, Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their comfortable life in Germany, each member of the family comes to terms with the harsh realities of life in Africa in their own way, haunted by the atrocities in Nazi Germany.
The film has won acclaim in particular for its cinematography, which captures breathtaking landscapes of the African bush and local life.
Link says that her aim in film is to "tell a story, that doesn't only entertain, but also touches the soul." The film has now attracted considerable attention abroad, including the U.S., marking a new era in German film, according to producer Peter Hermann.
Fascinated by film
Caroline Link was born in Bad Nauheim in 1964. Her love-affair with film began during an internship at the Bavaria Film Studios. In the following years, Link made various attempts at making films, both as script editor and assistant director. But it was in the role of director, that Link finally saw success: both of her first films -- Summer Days (Sommertage), and the children's film Kalle the dreamer (Kalle der Träumer) -- received numerous prizes in Germany.
In 1996, Link achieved her international breakthrough with Beyond Silence (Jenseits der Stille), which was nominated for the foreign language Oscar, after receiving numerous other prizes, including the Bavarian Film Award and the German Film Award.
Modesty unchanged
Despite her shooting star career, Link has remained remarkably down to earth: Following the news of Nowhere in Africa's Oscar nomination, the German director said she would "rather stay at home and carry on with her work" than fly to the U.S. for the award ceremony.
"I would probably have some important meetings with important Hollywood people, but I really don't want to be just one in thousands," she told news agency dpa.