Family saga

The German film based on Stephanie Zweig's bestseller, that won this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar has every saleable element of the Holocaust genre, this time viewed from a comfortable distance.

Jewish refugees from the Reich scrape a bare living on a Kenyan farm, against a backdrop of travelogue lushness, African tribal rites, locusts swarming and the sentimental hankering for the homeland that Germans call heimweh and the rest of us, homesickness.

It is incident-packed, decently acted and thankfully doesn't patronise the blacks whose condition of tenuous dependency echoes the incomers' own - the growth of affection between the family's fiveyearold child (Lea Kurka) and the stoic Masai cook (Sidede Onyulo) is subtle and touching. History's ironies are delicately treated.

The family are interned as enemy aliens, but the women get quartered in a posh hotel which declines to lower its standards, so it's grilled lobsters for dinner instead of the outback's bean-and-maize diet.

The mother (Julianne Kohler) starts off resenting African privations and refusing to throw out the Rosenthal china to make room for kerosene lamps; but her stoicism wins, topped up with extramarital support from a handsome British Sarge.

But Caroline Link's patiently Teutonic detailing of daily life skims over the essential question of identity. Where does the allegiance of these displaced people lie: are they Jews, Germans, new Kenyans or prospective Israelis? That's the real story; it's the one that the film sidesteps.