In the growing, often somewhat suspicious, trend of based-on-a-true-story movies, writer-director Carolina Link’s subtitled Nowhere in Africa arrives on American shores trailing the usual citations of international and festival awards. Based on the first of Stefanie Zweig’s two bestseller "autobiographical novels," it has proved Germany’s highest grossing film for most of the current year (2002).

Not long before borders are closed and their remaining loved ones killed outright or shipped to work-concentration camps, Jettel Redlich and her young daughter Regina leave the snowy Third Reich to join her husband Walter in arid Kenya. Neither female looks remotely Jewish, and, although their religion and persecution are the causes of the departure, the family’s Jewishness is not an overriding issue here.

Rather, Link and Zweig center on the family’s relationships, to each other, to the sense of their adopted homeland and its people, and to memories of their native country. In the later grown-up Regina’s opening voiced-over frame, her images of that Fatherland have all but faded. Theoretically the story is from her vantage point, although we learn things the child, and later teenage schoolgirl, could not know. For example, Walter and Jettel are obviously emotionally and therefore sexually mismatched. Though loving with her father-in-law Max, pampered Jettel may unconsciously have married the son for his black-robed status as a lawyer (soon forbidden to practice by the Nazis). To the remote scrubland farm of which her husband is badgered and ineffectual overseer, she brings, not the refrigerator he requested, but fancy chinaware and an evening dress purchased in Breslau.

There is little chemistry-- not between the actors, but between the characters, husband and wife. Lavishing open affection on the daughter, they are mutually cold, distant and bickering. Frustrated with their fates -- she as isolated housewife, he as failed farmer -- they slowly grow aware of their new land through the eyes of their common link, Regina, who predictably adapts to her surroundings while retaining a sense of her own difference.

This is a story about people, concentrating at that on only a very few, and intelligently is not turned into the usual oh-ah background travelogue on Africa and its fauna. Dry or lush, landscape and animals simply enhance tone, but, aside from the wise, patient employee-friend Owuor and one brief encounter with wartime Nairobi’s ethnic variety and another with a dying Pokot bushwoman, color is subdued as focus is unsparingly on the three Redlichs, admirable yet flawed human beings.

"Flawed," too, however, must be the judgment on the final product. Like many current films, this is too long, though not, as in most other cases, because of budget-fertilizing special effects and action sequences. In building a feeling of dissatisfaction and ennui, its pace of time passing is simply too slow and subdued. While clothing (including delicate dresses and lingerie) from the Old Country survives ridiculously well, Regina grows to young womanhood. While the Third World pictured here is not as desperate, poverty-stricken and dirty as it really was (and is), unseen Europe looms timeless and large. While relationships fray and are reassembled, Walter sinks into angry aimlessness, yet there is insufficient preparation for his final decision and no explanation for strong-willed Jettel’s acceptance.

What is needed? Sharper editing, less footage, more exposition of motivation and what characters are thinking. (Lonely fellow expatriate Walter Süsskind could have been used as sounding-board/confidant, but he is mostly silent and self-contained.) Exposing characters’ inner selves is, admittedly, not an easy task in this instance, for the heart of their trouble involves an inability to communicate honestly, to give body and voice to hope and desire.

As a friend overseas succinctly put it, tira la tierra, one’s native land pulls one back. In a world of deracination and mass migration resulting from catastrophes both natural and man-made, questions of culture, acceptance and adaptation become of increasing importance. Nowhere in Africa is certainly a beginning in the difficult search for answers. Solutions are essential, but the path must first be more cogently defined.