June 8, 2003 – The quote was: "The ones that benefit the most from competition are the consumers." The context was telecommunications, and the person to whom the comment was attributed is Holland L. Redfield II, vice president for corporate affairs of Innovative Communication Corp.
The venue, however, was not the Virgin Islands or its Public Services Commission, where ICC's subsidiary, Innovative Telephone, has fought moves by would-be competitor Choice Communications to provide alternative local phone service.
Redfield was quoted in a front-page news story on Friday in The Daily Herald of Sint Maarten.
Described by the newspaper as "chairman of the U.S.V.I. Bush Leadership Team," he was reported by the newspaper to have been in the Dutch possession along with ICC public relations director Thomas J. Dunn "to discuss the granting of international concessions to the local branch of their company, East Caribbean Cellular."
ICC owns St. Maarten Cable TV as well as East Caribbean Cellular. In the Virgin Islands, its headquarters, the corporation owns Innovative Telephone, both V.I. cable TV companies, Innovative Wireless, Innovative Business Systems, Innovative Long Distance, V.I. PowerNet and the V.I. Daily News.
Redfield and Dunn met with ECC managing director Jerry Sardine before a scheduled meeting with Sarah Wescott-Williams, Sint Maarten's leader of government, the newspaper reported. Redfield told The Daily Herald that ICC was optimistic that Wescott-Williams "will be sensitive to the issue of granting an international concession to ECC."
According to the newspaper, the cellular company has come under criticism for being a foreign-based company with little local interest. However, the paper quoted Redfield as stating: "I don't consider our company foreign. I would say we are a regional company, but our commitment to St. Maarten to date has been unprecedented. … We hire locally and always place emphasis on elevating our local staff to top management positions, while always ensuring that we put back into the community."
ECC's application for an international concession has been on hold for two years, the Herald said, apparently because of a government request to put a hold on telecommunications licenses until a comprehensive local market study has been made.
"However, CellularOne, which submitted its request for a similar concession after ECC, was granted a concession by the Council of Ministers in Curaçao, much to the surprise and dismay of the St. Maarten government," the Herald stated.. "Now it is the intention of ICC to go to Curaçao" to meet with government officials "on the issue of granting ICC its international concession."
The paper quoted Redfield as saying that "the ones that benefit the most from competition are the consumers and St. Maarten … the movement throughout the world is open market, and the key to St. Maarten's economic advancement is in telecommunications because we are in the right era with telecommunications."

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June 8, 2003 – Dr. Alfred O. Heath will receive the 2nd annual Alexander A. Farrelly Public Service Award, presented by Virgin Islanders for Responsive Government, at a gala dinner on Saturday night at the Wyndham Sugar Bay Resort.
The award recognizes exceptional Virgin Islands leaders and public servants. The first recipient, honored last year, was Gov. Charles W. Turnbull.
For this year's award, James A. O'Bryan Jr., president of Virgin Islanders for Responsive Government, said, "the board of directors looked at the many contributions Dr. Heath has made to the community in medicine and health care, military service, business and community, music and his church, and could find no better-qualified candidate to select for this very noteworthy recognition."
Herbert R. Tillery, deputy mayor of Washington, D.C., will be the keynote speaker for the award dinner.
Loretta Lloyd, an organizer of Saturday's event, said the recipients of the award must possess qualities including courage, dedication, responsibility, commitment and conviction. Heath, a physician, surgeon and activist in many areas of the community, "possesses all of those qualities and more," Lloyd said.
Heath served as health commissioner and also as chief executive officer at what was then St. Thomas Hospital (now Roy L. Schneider Hospital) in the administration of Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly. He was the Democratic Party's candidate for lieutenant governor in 1994, running with former Lt. Gov. Derek Hodge unsuccessfully against the Schneider/Mapp team.
Heath served for 30 years in the V.I. National Guard and received the V.I. Distinguished Service Medal and Legion of Merit Award when he retired in 1999. He served for 19 years on the University of the Virgin Islands board of trustees, including terms as vice chair and chair, and was named trustee emeritus in 1997. He has been a director of the UVI Foundation for 10 years and was named its chair last year.
He is a member of St. Thomas Rotary and the Caribbean Chorale. He is a Eucharistic minister and lector at Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral, where he sings in the choir. He is also a licensed pilot.
Tickets to the black-tie dinner are $100. They're available at Private Collection, First Choice Boutique and Nisky Pharmacy, or by calling June Adams at 777-3648. Proceeds are to benefit the presenting organization's philanthropic and humanitarian programs.
Virgin Islanders for Responsive Government is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2001 to promote community-based social initiatives, O'Bryan said. He said the group plans to use proceeds from various fund-raises to establish after-school programs for students.

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June 8, 2003 – With a history of emphasis on tradition, 2003 marked a year of endings and of new beginnings for Antilles School, as hundreds of family members and friends gathered for Friday's commencement celebration.
Held for the first time in the Mark C. Marin Sports Center, the commencement also was the first for new headmaster Arthur Scott. He presented the 43 students — the school's largest graduating class ever — for "this special rite of passage which stresses the idea of the power of communion, the opportunity for change, and the power of re-invention."
To the sounds of "Pomp and Circumstance," the seniors completed a lap around the floor before taking their places on stage, where Jay Buckley, head of the Upper School, made opening remarks.
There followed comments by Scott and by Vernique Callwood, president of the school's National Honor Society chapter, and a rousing rendition of the national anthem sung by Gala Garcia, a member of the Class of 2003.
Co-salutatorians Lane Sell and Dennis Jones presented a balanced mix of sentiment and perspective as they addressed their classmates about taking their next steps into the "real world" while also relating many personal anecdotes.
"The lessons I've learned from my fellow graduates are as useful as those learned from my teachers," Jones said. In a similar vein, valedictorian Nikki Tyler said: "The friendships I've acquired at Antilles are incredible, and totally unbreakable."
Commencement speaker Drew Brown III, owner-operator of Coldstone Creamery on St. Thomas and a pilot for Federal Express, focused on the importance for young people of hard work and education. He offered as an equation: "Education plus hard work minus drugs equals success and the American dream."
However, Brown added, success does not necessarily equate to money. "You see people out there, like teachers, who don't make a lot of money." he said, "But that's all right, because they do something that money doesn't buy … They help people."
Brown encouraged the graduates to pursue their dreams, and closed by telling them to remember that "there is no black and white … There is only ignorance and intelligence."
Senior Class president Simone Barry in her farewell address asked her peers, "How did we do it?" And then she answered: "By learning from our mistakes and supporting each other when we succeeded."
All 43 graduates have been accepted into colleges and universities in order to further their education.

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June 8, 2003 – From June 13 to 15 the Joseph Aubain Ballpark in Frenchtown will be transformed into a mini Carnival Village complete with dueling bands, dancing, and booths full of Caribbean food and cold beer in honor of Father's Day.
The festivities, sponsored annually by the Committee for the Betterment of Carenage, will begin with opening ceremonies at 7 p.m. on Friday when Miss Carenage 2003, Jennifer Greaux, will be crowned.
Governor Charles W. Turnbull and an assortment of officials will also be on hand to deliver remarks at the ceremony.
. Milo's Kings, the Sea Breeze Band and the Hard Core Band will be in Frenchtown throughout the weekend to keep the celebrants jumpin', and booths selling a huge assortment of local foods and drinks will line the stage in the ballpark's outfield.
Things should heat up on Saturday night when several ranking calypsonians will join forces with Imagination Brass to stage a calypso spectacular.
The Father's Day celebration will conclude in grand Carenage-style on Sunday evening when the winners of the Mother's Day and Pre-Father's Day Fishing Tournaments will be announced and several prizes, including a cash purse of $2,000 for the "Biggest Fish," will be given out.
According to event organizer Gail Joseph, "The Father's Day celebration promises to be a great experience for the entire family."
The event's sponsors include Coor's Light, distributed by Bellows International, and Offshore Marine.

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Superintendent of Schools for St. Thomas-St. John, William I. Frett, and St. Croix, Terrence T. Joseph, have announced that the official closing date for public elementary and junior high schools is Thursday, June 12, and for senior high schools, Monday, June 16.
These dates are also the last dates teachers must report to school.

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Superintendent of Schools for St. Thomas-St. John, William I. Frett, and St. Croix, Terrence T. Joseph, have announced that the official closing date for public elementary and junior high schools is Thursday, June 12, and for senior high schools, Monday, June 16.
These dates are also the last dates teachers must report to school.

Publisher's note : Like the St. John Source now? Find out how you can love us twice as much — and show your support for the islands' free and independent news voice … click here.

June 8, 2003 – In January of 2002, the Birch Forum ventured into new territory, presenting a mini-film series of three internationally themed, produced and acclaimed motion pictures, which played for one night only at Market Square East.
The organization, now reconstituted as simply The Forum, is about to do the same thing for the next three Wednesdays. All three films booked for this mini-fest are based on real-life people and events, all set in the first half of the 20th century, and all are winners of major film awards.
The offerings:
June 11 – "Frida," about the life of Mexican surrealist painter and cultural icon Frida Kahlo, the wife of muralist Diego Rivera.
June 18 – "Rabbit-Proof Fence," the story of three Australian Aboriginal children seized by the government as national policy to be trained as domestic workers for white families, and who escape their captors and embark on a 1,200-mile walk home across the Outback.
June 25 – "Nowhere in Africa," the account of a successful Jewish lawyer and his wife and 5-year-old daughter who flee Nazi Germany in 1938 to settle on a farm in Kenya, where each deals with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways.
All three showings will begin at 8 p.m. Admission is $13 for each film. Tickets are available in advance at the Reichhold Center for the Arts box office, Modern Music in Nisky Center, Parrot Fish Music, Dockside Bookshop, Interiors, Krystal and Gifts Galore and Home Again on St. Thomas; and Connections on St. John.
For more information, call 774-2260.
These are not box-office hits with bankable big-name stars. But they all have won major cinema awards. And for both reasons, The Forum is bringing them to the Virgin Islands. Here's more background on each. Visit your favorite movie Web sites to see what reviewers have to say about all three.
"Frida"
This 2002 release stars Mexican actress Salma Hayek as Kahlo, Alfred Molina as Rivera, Antonio Banderas as Rivera's artistic rival David Siqueiros and Ashley Judd as Italian photographer Tina Modotti.
The film focuses on Kahlo's often rocky relationship with Rivera and their place in Mexican society. A surrealist painter notorious as a bisexual and a communist, Kahlo was condemned to a life of physical pain by a trolley accident; she suffered the amputation of a leg and that killed her at the age of 47.
The couple's circle of associates ranged from Nelson Rockefeller (who contracted Rivera to paint the lobby mural of Rockefeller Center, only to renege because it included an image of Lenin) to Russian theorist Leon Trotsky to leading visual and performing artists of the day.
Annlee Ellingson, writing for the Box Office online review, says that Hayek, who also produced the film, and Julie Taymor, who directed, "have infused 'Frida' with a visual style unique and inherent to the titular character's paintings and in the process created a masterful work of art of their own."
In the film, Ellingson writes, Kahlo's paintings of herself and her family "literally come to life, brushstrokes slowly morphing into celluloid as the guests at Frida and Diego's wedding, for example, gradually move into the frame of their wedding portrait. Or when Frida undergoes painful experimental surgery, she paints a picture of her spine in the metal contraption in which her bones literally crumble and tears flow from her eyes. Through stylistic touches like these, 'Frida' is firmly rooted not only in cinema but in the art form through which Frida expressed herself."
Maggie Shiels of the BBC found it "a very entertaining, colourful and boisterous movie," allthough she felt there is "too much emphasis on Kahlo's tempestuous marriage to Rivera and not enough about the woman hailed as a feminist icon and a model of sexual freedom and unconventional lifestyles."
The trolley accident, Shiels writes, "shown in slow motion, is a mastery of film making by director Julie Taymor that allows you to experience the horror of the crash. Afterwards there is a surreal sequence that takes us inside an animated hospital where puppet skeletons try to put a damaged Frida back together again."
As for the acting, Chicago critic Roger Ebert writes that the role of Rivera was one that Molina had "trained for a lifetime to play" and that Hayek "is electric and fascinating."
"Frida" garnered six 2003 Academy Award nominations — for best actress (Hayek), art direction, costume design, score, song ("Burn It Blue") and makeup. It captured the Oscar for makeup — which included Kahlo's distinctive "unibrow" — her connecting eyebrows. The film is rated R for sexuality/nudity and language. It was filmed in English.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence"
Also a 2002 release, this Australian film stars three untrained actors as the young Aboriginal girls who are the victims of a government policy requiring "half caste" children to be taken from their homes, trained as domestic servants and farm workers, and then placed in white homes so as to "advance" them into society.
The policy, instituted in 1900, resulted in the forcible removal of thousands of children from their Aboriginal mothers. Although the "stolen generations" became the subject of fierce debate, the policy was not lifted until 1971. Australia's very recent history from the perspective of its people of color is one of loss — of land, of culture, of pride, even of their own children..
The movie was directed by Philip Noyce, an Australian film maker whose Hollywood successes ("Patriot Games," "The Bone Collector" and, most recently "The Quiet American") had long since landed him in Los Angeles. The film is based on a book, "Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence," by Doris Pilkington and Nugi Garimara. Pilkington is the daughter of Molly Craig, the oldest of the three girls.
Told from Molly's point of view, the film contrasts her spiritual and intuitive relationship to the people and places she encounters on the journey with the coldly calculated determination of the legal guardian of the country's indigenous people to "breed out" the Aboriginal blood of the half-castes.
Molly, 14, was taken from her mother in Jigalong, a depot on one of the fences that were being constructed across the continent in an attempt to keep marauding rabbits from destroying the western farmlands. She, her half-sister Daisy, 8, and their cousin Gracie Fields, were taken to a "native settlement" in Western Australia.
After their escape, the girls walk for nine weeks and 1,200 miles across the Outback, using the long stretches of fencing to guide them back home — and their wits and inner strength to elude capture, starvation and exhaustion along the way. The ending is not altogether happy, a blending of tragedy and triumph.
Molly is played by Everlyn Sampi, who is of mixed Aborigine and Scottish ancestry; her own mother was a victim of forced placement. Everlyn did not adapt readily to the demands of filmmaking, Noyce said in an interview, trying to run away and driving him to despair.
"We tried desperately to recast," he said, "but we just couldn't find anyone who was nearly as charismatic and talented … The more she rejected us, the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly — her disdain for authority, her skepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her … She is Molly."
The real Molly and Daisy appear briefly at the emotional end of the film, old women now. Molly married and had two daughters, Doris and Annabelle. She was returned to the settlement with them, escaped and walked back to Jigalong again, carrying the infant Annabelle; the authorities caught her and took the baby and Molly never saw her again. Even sadder, years later, when Doris tried to contact her sister, the light-skinned Annabelle, who was raised as a Caucasian, rebuffed her, saying "I don't want to know anything about my history."
The film is rated PG. It was named Best Film and collected a host of other honors at the 2002 Australian Film Industry Awards.
"Nowhere in Africa"
Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany as the Nazi regime gains power in 1938, Jewish lawyer Walter Redlich, his wife, Jettel, and their young daughter Regina move to a remote farm in Kenya, where he has gotten work as caretaker.
Walter (Merab Ninidze) is resigned to his self-exile. Jettel (Julianne Köhler), accustomed to a pampered life, has attitude adjustment problems from the get-go. (Before leaving Germany to join her husband, she ships the family china instead of the refrigerator he asked for.) Regina (played first by Lea Kurka and then, aging a few years, by Karoline Kckertz) adapts as only children can — embracing her new homeland, learning the language and customs of the Pokot tribe and finding a friend in Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), the farm cook.
After Britain declares war on Germany, Jettel has an affair with a British soldier and, as a result, her family, although German, receives preferential treatment. Regina is allowed to attend school and Walter is given a good job. Besides infidelity, the couple agonizes over the realization that they may never see their families in Germany again.
As the war rages, Walter grows increasingly haunted by the life they left behind, and when it ends, he contemplates a return to Germany — unlike his wife and daughter.
Described by one reviewer as part wartime drama, part storybook for children, the film was written and directed by Caroline Link (whose "Beyond Silence" was nominated for an Oscar in 1997) and is based on a best-selling autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig.
Reviewer Amit Asaravala, writing for filmcritic.com, says that "Far from being yet another war epic," the movie "deals primarily with the trials and triumphs of starting a new life in a foreign land … Kurka and Eckertz both give skillful performances as Regina … The character comes off as being not only blissfully innocent but fiercely intelligent. When the Pokot children teach her how to warm her feet in cow dung, or when she gathers everyone around for a story about angels, you can't help but wonder whether the tribe still talks about Stefanie Zweig so many years later."
Alex Pigman, writing for Show Business online, makes the inevitable comparisons to the 1980s film "Out of Africa" but says that "the World War II premise is fresh, and the plight of sun-drenched refugees hearing about the horror back home through an unreliable radio is powerful stuff." He, like many critics, however, faults the film for its focus on "a world where the life of the native exists primarily as a backdrop for the adventures of colonial new arrivals."
"Nowhere in Africa" was the winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and of five Golden Lola German film awards, including for Best Film and Best Director. It's in German, English and Swahili with English subtitles. The film is not rated but is described as including "adult situations" and "some nudity."

Publisher's note : Like the St. Thomas Source now? Find out how you can love us twice as much — and show your support for the islands' free and independent news voice … click here.

June 8, 2003 – In January of 2002, the Birch Forum ventured into new territory, presenting a mini-film series of three internationally themed, produced and acclaimed motion pictures, which played for one night only at Market Square East.
The organization, now reconstituted as simply The Forum, is about to do the same thing for the next three Wednesdays. All three films booked for this mini-fest are based on real-life people and events, all set in the first half of the 20th century, and all are winners of major film awards.
The offerings:
June 11 – "Frida," about the life of Mexican surrealist painter and cultural icon Frida Kahlo, the wife of muralist Diego Rivera.
June 18 – "Rabbit-Proof Fence," the story of three Australian Aboriginal children seized by the government as national policy to be trained as domestic workers for white families, and who escape their captors and embark on a 1,200-mile walk home across the Outback.
June 25 – "Nowhere in Africa," the account of a successful Jewish lawyer and his wife and 5-year-old daughter who flee Nazi Germany in 1938 to settle on a farm in Kenya, where each deals with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways.
All three showings will begin at 8 p.m. Admission is $13 for each film. Tickets are available in advance at the Reichhold Center for the Arts box office, Modern Music in Nisky Center, Parrot Fish Music, Dockside Bookshop, Interiors, Krystal and Gifts Galore and Home Again on St. Thomas; and Connections on St. John.
For more information, call 774-2260.
These are not boffo box-office hits with bankable big-name stars. But they all have won major cinema awards. And for both reasons, The Forum is bringing them to the Virgin Islands. Here's more background on each. Visit your favorite movie Web sites to see what reviewers have to say about all three.
"Frida"
This 2002 release stars Mexican actress Salma Hayek as Kahlo, Alfred Molina as Rivera, Antonio Banderas as Rivera's artistic rival David Siqueiros and Ashley Judd as Italian photographer Tina Modotti.
The film focuses on Kahlo's often rocky relationship with Rivera and their place in Mexican society. A surrealist painter notorious as a bisexual and a communist, Kahlo was condemned to a life of physical pain by a trolley accident; she suffered the amputation of a leg and that killed her at the age of 47.
The couple's circle of associates ranged from Nelson Rockefeller (who contracted Rivera to paint the lobby mural of Rockefeller Center, only to renege because it included an image of Lenin) to Russian theorist Leon Trotsky to leading visual and performing artists of the day.
Annlee Ellingson, writing for the Box Office online review, says that Hayek, who also produced the film, and Julie Taymor, who directed, "have infused 'Frida' with a visual style unique and inherent to the titular character's paintings and in the process created a masterful work of art of their own."
In the film, Ellingson writes, Kahlo's paintings of herself and her family "literally come to life, brushstrokes slowly morphing into celluloid as the guests at Frida and Diego's wedding, for example, gradually move into the frame of their wedding portrait. Or when Frida undergoes painful experimental surgery, she paints a picture of her spine in the metal contraption in which her bones literally crumble and tears flow from her eyes. Through stylistic touches like these, 'Frida' is firmly rooted not only in cinema but in the art form through which Frida expressed herself."
Maggie Shiels of the BBC found it "a very entertaining, colourful and boisterous movie," allthough she felt there is "too much emphasis on Kahlo's tempestuous marriage to Rivera and not enough about the woman hailed as a feminist icon and a model of sexual freedom and unconventional lifestyles."
The trolley accident, Shiels writes, "shown in slow motion, is a mastery of film making by director Julie Taymor that allows you to experience the horror of the crash. Afterwards there is a surreal sequence that takes us inside an animated hospital where puppet skeletons try to put a damaged Frida back together again."
As for the acting, Chicago critic Roger Ebert writes that the role of Rivera was one that Molina had "trained for a lifetime to play" and that Hayek "is electric and fascinating."
"Frida" garnered six 2003 Academy Award nominations — for best actress (Hayek), art direction, costume design, score, song ("Burn It Blue") and makeup. It captured the Oscar for makeup — which included Kahlo's distinctive "unibrow" — her connecting eyebrows. The film is rated R for sexuality/nudity and language. It was filmed in English.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence"
Also a 2002 release, this Australian film stars three untrained actors as the young Aboriginal girls who are the victims of a government policy requiring "half caste" children to be taken from their homes, trained as domestic servants and farm workers, and then placed in white homes so as to "advance" them into society.
The policy, instituted in 1900, resulted in the forcible removal of thousands of children from their Aboriginal mothers. Although the "stolen generations" became the subject of fierce debate, the policy was not lifted until 1971. Australia's very recent history from the perspective of its people of color is one of loss — of land, of culture, of pride, even of their own children..
The movie was directed by Philip Noyce, an Australian film maker whose Hollywood successes ("Patriot Games," "The Bone Collector" and, most recently "The Quiet American") had long since landed him in Los Angeles. The film is based on a book, "Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence," by Doris Pilkington and Nugi Garimara. Pilkington is the daughter of Molly Craig, the oldest of the three girls.
Told from Molly's point of view, the film contrasts her spiritual and intuitive relationship to the people and places she encounters on the journey with the coldly calculated determination of the legal guardian of the country's indigenous people to "breed out" the Aboriginal blood of the half-castes.
Molly, 14, was taken from her mother in Jigalong, a depot on one of the fences that were being constructed across the continent in an attempt to keep marauding rabbits from destroying the western farmlands. She, her half-sister Daisy, 8, and their cousin Gracie Fields, were taken to a "native settlement" in Western Australia.
After their escape, the girls walk for nine weeks and 1,200 miles across the Outback, using the long stretches of fencing to guide them back home — and their wits and inner strength to elude capture, starvation and exhaustion along the way. The ending is not altogether happy, a blending of tragedy and triumph.
Molly is played by Everlyn Sampi, who is of mixed Aborigine and Scottish ancestry; her own mother was a victim of forced placement. Everlyn did not adapt readily to the demands of filmmaking, Noyce said in an interview, trying to run away and driving him to despair.
"We tried desperately to recast," he said, "but we just couldn't find anyone who was nearly as charismatic and talented … The more she rejected us, the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly — her disdain for authority, her skepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her … She is Molly."
The real Molly and Daisy appear briefly at the emotional end of the film, old women now. Molly married and had two daughters, Doris and Annabelle. She was returned to the settlement with them, escaped and walked back to Jigalong again, carrying the infant Annabelle; the authorities caught her and took the baby and Molly never saw her again. Even sadder, years later, when Doris tri ed to contact her sister, the light-skinned Annabelle, who was raised as a Caucasian, rebuffed her, saying "I don't want to know anything about my history."
The film is rated PG. It was named Best Film and collected a host of other honors at the 2002 Australian Film Industry Awards.
"Nowhere in Africa"
Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany as the Nazi regime gains power in 1938, Jewish lawyer Walter Redlich, his wife, Jettel, and their young daughter Regina move to a remote farm in Kenya, where he has gotten work as caretaker.
Walter (Merab Ninidze) is resigned to his self-exile. Jettel (Julianne Köhler), accustomed to a pampered life, has attitude adjustment problems from the get-go. (Before leaving Germany to join her husband, she ships the family china instead of the refrigerator he asked for.) Regina (played first by Lea Kurka and then, aging a few years, by Karoline Kckertz) adapts as only children can — embracing her new homeland, learning the language and customs of the Pokot tribe and finding a friend in Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), the farm cook.
After Britain declares war on Germany, Jettel has an affair with a British soldier and, as a result, her family, although German, receives preferential treatment. Regina is allowed to attend school and Walter is given a good job. Besides infidelity, the couple agonizes over the realization that they may never see their families in Germany again.
As the war rages, Walter grows increasingly haunted by the life they left behind, and when it ends, he contemplates a return to Germany — unlike his wife and daughter.
Described by one reviewer as part wartime drama, part storybook for children, the film was written and directed by Caroline Link (whose "Beyond Silence" was nominated for an Oscar in 1997) and is based on a best-selling autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig.
Reviewer Amit Asaravala, writing for filmcritic.com, says that "Far from being yet another war epic," the movie "deals primarily with the trials and triumphs of starting a new life in a foreign land … Kurka and Eckertz both give skillful performances as Regina … The character comes off as being not only blissfully innocent but fiercely intelligent. When the Pokot children teach her how to warm her feet in cow dung, or when she gathers everyone around for a story about angels, you can't help but wonder whether the tribe still talks about Stefanie Zweig so many years later."
Alex Pigman, writing for Show Business online, makes the inevitable comparisons to the 1980s film "Out of Africa" but says that "the World War II premise is fresh, and the plight of sun-drenched refugees hearing about the horror back home through an unreliable radio is powerful stuff." He, like many critics, however, faults the film for its focus on "a world where the life of the native exists primarily as a backdrop for the adventures of colonial new arrivals."
"Nowhere in Africa" was the winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and of five Golden Lola German film awards, including for Best Film and Best Director. It's in German, English and Swahili with English subtitles. The film is not rated but is described as including "adult situations" and "some nudity."

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The Nikken Wellness Consultants are creating a new mutual support group scheduled to meet at 6 p.m.on Wednesday, June 11, at Tickles Restaurant in Crown Bay.
All consultants and aspiring consultants are welcome to attend this meeting.
For further information or to RSVP, leave a message for Lucy at 776-0684.

The V.I. Territorial Committee will be meeting from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 14. The meeting will take place at the University of Virgin Islands video conferencing facilities, on St. Croix in room 713, on St. Thomas in room T101.

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