To her, Nazis are little more than costume villains, though on the eve of Hitler’s election, her parents are rather more concerned. We meet 9-year-old Anna in Berlin in 1933, hiding from boys in Nazi uniform at a children’s fancy-dress party, before her Zorro-masked older brother Max (Marinus Hohmann, warmly responsive with his onscreen sister) fends them off.
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. Anna begins to understand life will never be the same as she and her family navigate unfamiliar lands and cope with the challenges of being refugees.Reaching U.S.
But when her father (Oliver Masucci) - based on the prominent theater critic Alfred Kerr - suddenly vanishes, the family is secretly hurried out of Germany. Anna is too busy with schoolwork and friends to notice Hitler's face glaring from posters plastered all over 1933 Berlin. The story of a Jewish family's escape from 1933 Berlin to Europe tackles prejudice, exile, displacement and adaptation, as told from the perspective of the author's alter ego, nine year-old Anna Kemper (Riva Krymalowski in her feature film debut). From Academy Award® winning director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa)'s comes an adaptation of acclaimed British author Judith Kerr's classic novel based on her childhood memories.
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