By Donald H. Harrison

But for their combined length, these two warmly sentimental films might be shown as companion features at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. Both are stories about making adjustments to new people in strange places, and both renew our faith in human warmth, decency, and goodness.

In Nowhere in Africa, we follow a family of German Jews who have emigrated to the scrublands of Kenya to escape life in nazi Germany. Previously a lawyer, the father is happy to find work as a farm manager. The daughter is captivated by tribal customs in Kenya and falls in love with a kind and gentle people. But the wife pines for the pre-nazi German culture and family members she left behind. A White woman in Black Africa, she must overcome some of her own prejudices.

In Il Cielo Cade ("The Sky Is Falling"), the German Jew is not a refugee but a rescuer. Married to a Catholic woman and living in a large manor house in Tuscany, Wilhelm Einstein and his wife adopt two young Italian Catholic girls who have lost their parents. Their patience and kindness in raising the adorable youngsters fill the viewers with a warm glow. Such menschlekeit.

In both films, there are funny cultural misadventures. Attached to the manor in Italy are the tenant farmers, whose children befriend the little girls. During one of their outings, the younger girl finds the tenants' outhouse fascinating, never having seen one before. Investigating too closely, she
falls into the muck below. Covered in it, she tearfully returns to the manor, where the startled cooks and maids try to comfort and clean her, all the while trying not to smell her.

In Kenya, the wife must draw water in large cans from a pond— her proud but kind houseman telling her that, in his culture, carrying water is women's work. Under the gaze of the village women, she does so, but complains that the cans are too heavy. Reluctantly, the houseman relieves her of her burden, prompting a chorus of laughter and teasing from the village women.
Oh, ours are so heavy! Carry ours, too!

Of the two films, Nowhere in Africa is the more nuanced. It takes place over a long enough period for the characters to develop. The relationship between the husband and wife is stormy. There is adultery. Il Cielo Cade, occupying a more compressed time period, is more one-dimensional. Any defects in the main characters are blurred by time and affectionate memory.

In Nowhere in Africa, the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain results in the German Jewish refugees being arrested as enemy aliens by the British colonial government of Kenya. What an irony: People who are the chief victims of the nazis are lumped together with the nazis! But it is a gentle imprisonment, with wives and children put up in a first-class resort hotel. Eventually, the husband opts to join the British Army to fight in Burma.

In Il Cielo Cade, after Mussolini¹s government falls, the Germans invade the Italian town. A chess-loving and grandfatherly German general occupies the manor, treating the family courteously. He plays and loses a game of chess with the father nearly every evening. But, ominously, not far behind the regular German troops are the nazi SS officers.

Other movies being shown during the Jewish Film Festival, such as Amen, Inherit the Earth and Desperate Hours, explore the relationships between Jews and the Catholic Church. The theme also is touched upon in Il Cielo Cade. The village priest remonstrates with the Jewish father for not sending the girls in his care to Mass. Notwithstanding his disappointment, he is the
first to warn the family of the danger they are in.

In both movies, household servants are important characters, not just functionaries, whose lives we come to appreciate for their own sakes. Set in a time when the world was beset by madness and genocide, Il Cielo Cade and Nowhere in Africa strongly make the point that human differences should be appreciated and that every human must be treated with dignity.

* The Jewish Film Festival presents the R-rated Nowhere in Africa at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 8, at the AMC La Jolla Theatre and at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 9, at the Hazard Madstone Theatre. Il Cielo Cade will screen at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 15, at the Ultrastar La Costa and at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 16, at the AMC La Jolla.