IN KENYA, HOLOCAUST ESCAPEES START OVER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

GERMANY'S contender for this year's foreign language film Oscar, ``Nowhere in Africa,'' engrossingly combines another unusual, true Holocaust survival story with one of the better filmed examinations of Europeans in British colonial Kenya.

Like the hokier ``Out of Africa'' and ``I Dreamed of Africa,'' ``Nowhere'' is based on a woman's memoir. But journalist Stefanie Zweig not only made no bones about calling her book an autobiographical novel, she was a child during much of her family's equatorial exile. While this would naturally call some of her memories into question, it also inspired Zweig to think deeply about what the whole journey meant - in terms of white-black relations, the immigrant and British Jewish communities' experience and, most compelling, to her parents' far from sturdy marriage.

The resulting movie, written and directed in great leisurely detail by Caroline Link (``Beyond Silence''), contains most of the elements that mark this subgenre: initial, unhappy white disorientation; wise and helpful natives; gorgeous rugged scenery; even a locust swarm. Yet somehow, the exotic, paternalistic and pictorial excesses that have been in other films on the subject are kept in rigorous check here. We get the beauty of the setting and the distinctions between the cultures in what feel like completely natural proportions. This is not a safari movie, but one about life as it was lived on the savanna, not so long ago.

At the same time, ``Nowhere'' is a Holocaust film like few others. The suffering is, in a historical sense, negligible. Yet the personal impact of the calamity is evoked with a jarring completeness.

Three very lucky people, Walter (Georgian actor Merab Ninidze), Jettel (Juliane Kohler, whom you may recognize from ``Aimee and Jaguar'') and their daughter Regina Redlich (Lea Kurka as a child, Karoline Eckertz as an adolescent) get out of Nazi Germany in 1938, several months before things got irreversibly bad for the Jews.

Ironically, though, that's a big source of the problem between Walter and Jettel. She's used to a very comfortable life, even under Hitler; when Walter, who went to Kenya ahead of the women, instructs his wife to bring a refrigerator, she uses precious trunk space for the family's fine china instead.

And when she reaches the dusty, dilapidated cattle ranch that her former lawyer husband oversees for a contemptuous Englishman, Jettel instructs the servants to keep the porcelain packed; they'll be moving to their real home soon. That doesn't go as she expects - in an amusing bit of absurdity, when the war breaks out, male German nationals are sent to internment camps while women and children are billeted in Nairobi's poshest hotel (whose Indian manager refuses to compromise quality standards). But for most of a decade, the Redlichs are obliged to make their living off the land that will never be theirs, but that Jettel gradually learns to love.

As she does her husband, but that's harder. It is clear from the beginning that the passion in their relationship has always been a one-way affair from him to her. Add the pressures of diminished circumstances, misguided but genuine homesickness and the gnawing anguish of not knowing what's happening to loved ones in Europe, and alienation of affection becomes well nigh inevitable. Without apologies, Kohler and Ninidze present us with two sometimes maddeningly selfish people. But the Redlichs' many flaws also make them two of the most thoroughly humanized Holocaust representatives ever put on film.

They have their good points, too. They're nice to the help and are thoroughly committed to their daughter's well-being. You would be, too, if your kid was as wonderful as little Regina (the film's falsest note: How could the offspring of such troubled parents be this well-adjusted?).

Regina is the first to bond with the Africans, especially with the nurturing cook Owuor, a stereotype made transcendentally multidimensional by Kenyan actor Sidede Onyulo. She is able, in her earnestly innocent way, to stand up to British condescension and anti-Semitism in a manner her parents cannot. Fortunately, as puberty takes hold, even Regina proves capable of imperfection.

Link's movie unfolds by accumulating cultural, political and behavioral observations. They ultimately prove as telling about individuals as they are about a very complex society, blessedly removed from the great horrors of World War II but deeply affected by them all the same. ``Nowhere in Africa'' is a physically gorgeous movie that finds deep psychological insights where most filmmakers just go hunting for big game.

NOWHERE IN AFRICA - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: sex, nudity, language, racism)

Starring: Juliane Kohler, Merab Ninidze, Karoline Eckertz.

Director: Caroline Link.

Running time: 2 hr. 18 min.

Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Cecchi Gori Fine Arts, Beverly Hills; Royal, West L.A.; Lido, Newport Beach.

In a nutshell: Another fascinating, true Holocaust survival story, about a troubled family that escapes to Kenya before the war.