Oscar Winner!
Best Foreign Language Film
2003 Academy Awards
Nowhere in Africa
A film by Caroline Link
| A love story spanning two continents, Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler, of Aimee and Jaguar) and their five-year-old daughter Regina each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. |
Presented with the British Film Institute
Free Cinema
Eleven Films
| OVID’s Free Cinema collection includes Lindsay Anderson’s groundbreaking O, Dreamland and Food for a Blush, Elizabeth Russel’s surreal tour of the bohemian scene in 1950’s Chelsea. Free Cinema not only reinvented British documentary making, but this highly influential period in the country’s cinema history was the precursor for the better known British New Wave of social realist films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The films were ‘free’ in the sense that they were made outside the framework of the film industry, and that their statements were entirely personal. They had in common not only the conditions of their production (shoestring budget, unpaid crew) and the equipment they employed (usually hand-held 16mm Bolex cameras), but also a style and attitude and an experimental approach to sound. Mostly funded by the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, they featured ordinary, mostly working-class people at work and play, displaying a rare sympathy and respect, and a self-consciously poetic style. |
Beanpole
A film by Kantemir Balagov
| In post-WWII Leningrad, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), intensely bonded after fighting side by side as anti-aircraft gunners, attempt to readjust to a haunted world. The 28-year-old Russian director Kantemir Balagov won Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war. |
OVID SVOD Exclusive!
Aimee & Jaguar
A film by Max Färberböck
| In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women. One of them, Lilly Wust (Nowhere in Africa’s Juliane Köhler), married and the mother of four sons, enjoys the privileges of her stature as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. For her, this affair will be the most decisive experience of her life. For the other woman, Felice Schragenheim (Maria Schrader), a Jewish woman and member of the underground, their love fuels her with the hope that she will survive. |
