Expanded horizons for an actress and her character

Juliane Kohler, a leading German actress, says her favorite line in the Oscar-nominated “Nowhere in Africa” occurs when her character -- a spoiled wife forced into exile by the Nazis -- surveys the remote, rain-starved Kenyan landscape of her new home and announces to her husband: “It’s a beautiful country, but I cannot live here.”

As a star on location in an isolated Kenyan village, Kohler could relate. For a third of the three-month shoot, she and the rest of the crew lived in tents, drank bottled water and worked through conditions that swung from drought to flooding.

Every night she checked her tent for snakes and shook when she heard elephants and giraffes. “Sometimes I was crying because of fear,” she says.

Once, Kohler says, she was talking to her husband on a cell phone when hundreds of Masai villagers approached in hopes of selling handiwork. “I said, ‘I have to go now, there are hundreds of Masais dancing around my tent.’ ”

Ultimately, though, the experience paid off.

The film won the top German film awards, plus 15 international and U.S. prizes. At the Golden Globes in January, it lost in the foreign-language category to Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her.” Because “Talk to Her” is not entered in the Oscars, “Nowhere in Africa” is now considered a top contender.

“It’s not very often a German film comes to Hollywood,” says Kohler, interviewed in Santa Monica a few days after the Globes. But it’s not the first time she has been to Hollywood. Her earlier film, 1999’s “Aimee & Jaguar” was also nominated for a Golden Globe. Critics say one of the best things about “Nowhere in Africa” is Kohler’s portrayal of the real-life Jettel Redlich, a difficult woman whose struggles to maintain her hardscrabble farm and faltering marriage are painfully realistic.

“I hope it’s not typecasting,” she says. “I like to play difficult characters and women with a lot of change in their character.”

Lanky and shy, Kohler, 37, is a delicate beauty who resembles the young Mia Farrow. She studied with Uta Hagen in New York for two years before returning home to work in Germany’s subsidized theater system.

Compared with Hollywood, acting in Germany is a low-budget, unglamorous business, but actors don’t need to struggle as hard for work and recognition, she says: “I have friends here [in the United States] who are very good actors and they are still unemployed.” In Germany, she says, an $8-million film like “Nowhere in Africa” is a major movie. The only times Kohler has ridden in a limousine occur when she’s in Hollywood. “In Germany,” she adds, “you can be a star for one movie, then no one knows you.”

Primarily a stage actress, Kohler says it hasn’t been easy for her to combine theater and film in Germany. Under her contract with the Residence Theater in Munich, she receives a salary for doing six plays a year. Because there is only one cast, the plays cannot continue when she shoots a movie.

In order to act in “Aimee & Jaguar,” she had to break her contract, which caused a national uproar. She was between contracts when the opportunity for “Nowhere in Africa” arose.

Kohler had worked with director Caroline Link before (in 1999’s “Annalouise and Anton”) and says she values their professional relationship partly because Link knows exactly what she wants and partly because she is a woman. Women, Kohler says, are able to focus on work and save their personal relationship for later. “I am never private when I’m working and she’s the same. I like this. With men, it’s always you are private with them, you become friends and then you work again and it’s difficult. With Caroline it was very professional. We talked only about the scene. After the shoot, we talked about private things.”

Link adapted Stephanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel about her Jewish family’s experiences in Africa, shifting the emphasis from daughter to mother.

Link also envisioned the Holocaust as a backdrop to Jettel’s development into an independent, mature woman who has to rethink her position in life and feelings about her homeland as well as her family relationships.

Every generation of Germans has to come to terms with the Holocaust, Kohler says, and the current crop of German filmmakers has traded the iconography of concentration camps and destruction for more personal stories along the lines of “The English Patient.” “We have so many documentaries about that. Now they try to show everything else,” she says.

The smaller stories elicit more sophisticated discussion about the Holocaust, particularly among young people seeking to accept that their country participated in such horrific events, producer Peter Herrmann says.

Despite the physical hardship, it was important to shoot in Kenya to make the film as authentic as possible, says Herrmann, who traveled with the crew. As an ethnographer who had spent several years in Africa, he says he knew how to get things done with little money.

After shooting the film, Kohler, Link and Herrmann formed a foundation and held special screenings in Germany to raise funds to support Mukutani, the village of 700 where they filmed and whose inhabitants appeared as Swahili-speaking extras.

Two weeks ago, Herrmann returned to Mukutani. Using a generator, he screened the film outdoors at night for the community. “The whole crowd was laughing,” he says. “They were very excited to see themselves and people they know.” Even without knowing specific words, he says, they understood the universal language of relationships in the movie.

Like her character, Kohler says she was changed by her experience in Africa. “All of a sudden, my horizon was so much wider. I never thought before how it is to leave the home. [Kenyans] are not so complicated. They really know what is important in life. Here in our world we always think, ‘I need more money, more clothing.’ They just have this ground.”