The compelling and true story of Karen Blixen, who runs a coffee plantation in Africa
In the heart of Africa, where coffee and humanity itself once spread to the world, a Danish intellectual, barely thirty years old, finds a new home and soon a lion's den, especially when she starts to be on her own. He's not complaining. On six hundred acres of land at an altitude of two thousand feet, Baroness Blixen cultivated the demanding coffee plant from the spring of 1914 until the crisis of 1931, and perceived the events around her with the keenness of the northerners who so love to seek a better self in a warm climate.
The hired indigenous Kikuyu trust their "Msabu", as she does not hesitate to heal, teach and sometimes even dehumanize them, without showing the superiority of the white ethnicity, which has long made a safari out of the land stolen from the natural peoples. The landscape of equatorial Kenya, magical, proud and harsh at the same time, will also bring painful losses to the author of this colourful semi-autobiographical series. And yet it retains the air of a lost paradise, to which the heart returns fondly in memory as to a mother's arms.
The story was made into a film by director Sydney Pollack, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The 1985 film won seven Academy Awards and three Golden Globes.
