![]() ![]() ![]() Wholly captivating in her big-screen debut, Riva Krymalowski is not just a vivid physical match for the dark, lively figure of Kerr’s illustrations, but has the rare child actor’s gift of playing alert thoughtfulness without veering into the precious or precocious. The new film’s great coup is the casting of its preteen protagonist Anna, a fretful and fanciful child who understands the ugly realities of the German Reich only in terms of how they disrupt her small, cosseted domestic world. The prevailing tone here is not far from that of Link’s Oscar-winning 2002 feature “Nowhere in Africa,” which also depicted the fish-out-of-water refugee experience of a German-Jewish family in the 1930s, softening a few sharp edges along the way. Unlike the book, this gently paced, multilingual saga is likely to be embraced more by an adult audience than a youthful one: Kerr’s bifocal storytelling trick of conveying harsh grown-up history in naive terms is harder to replicate on the screen than on the page. screens nearly 18 months after its release in Germany, Link’s film should satisfy the nostalgic demands of any viewers who grew up on Kerr’s novel - in large part thanks to some ideal casting and attentive period detailing. ![]()
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