Sitting in a Denver cafe, sipping a cup of English tea, Ngilu—Kenya’s minister for water and irrigation, and the highest-ranking member of a small delegation of leaders from her nation who are attending the Democratic convention—was reflecting on the unlikely rise of Barack Obama. Four years ago, the obscure Illinois legislator introduced himself to delegates at the Boston convention—and, by electrifying extension, the entire world—as a “skinny kid with a funny name.” That name, of course, is Kenyan, and back in the country where it originated, they’re feeling vicariously triumphant that it is now known around the globe.

“I think a win for Obama,” Ngilu said, “would really change the world.”

It’s news to no one—especially the Republican National Committee—that Barack Obama is adored overseas. Still, it’s worth revisiting the unprecedented nature of his foreign appeal. No modern presidential contender has had foreign parentage, as Obama does, and none has been tied more closely to another land. Obama’s father was not just any Kenyan, but a prominent member of the country’s political elite. During this campaign, journalists have burrowed into Barack Obama Sr.'s life story, discovering a seemingly endless stream of prospective presidential half-siblings, while conservative activists have attacked Barack Obama Sr.'s supposed socialist leanings. The unusual, and often uncomfortable, relationship between the candidate and Kenya has emerged as a central tension in his campaign--underscoring an uneasy sense, in some sectors of the electorate, that there is something not quite American about him.

Ngilu and the rest of her delegation--which also included Peter Ogego, the Kenyan ambassador to the United States, and Ann Njogu, a politician and women’s rights advocate--were in Denver, in part, to send a message to Americans: Don't be afraid. The delegation attended the convention as participants in the International Leaders Forum, an event sponsored by the National Democratic Institute, a foreign aid organization affiliated with the Democratic Party. Participants in the forum were able to attend some sessions of the convention, and also participated in a series of seminars and round-table discussions sponsored by NDI. One of them featured former President Bill Clinton, along with a number of other retired world leaders; another, on poverty reduction, featured the actor Ben Affleck. The events offer a rare opportunity for politicians from other countries to interact with their American counterparts--and for the Kenyans, an opportunity to advocate for their favored candidate. During a discussion of the media’s role in the campaign, which featured The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot and several other prominent journalists, Ann Njogu stood up to condemn what she saw as harsh media scrutiny.

“Kenyans like the rest of the world are indeed proud of the Barack Obama candidature—not because of his origin, but because of the kind of change that he portrays and intends to bring to the world scene on foreign policy,” said Njogu, who wore a long orange robe and had cascading head of corkscrew-curled hair. “I am curious though to know what the real motivation of the American press is in really emphasizing on the American and African roots of Barack Obama as opposed to seeking to advance the real change that he would be standing for.”

Gigot responded that Obama’s background was a valid issue, but assured Njogu, “The fact that he has that foreign heritage I think in the end will not make that much difference to most American voters.” E. J. Dionne, another member of the panel, said that he believed the adjective “exotic” was being used as a “code word.”

After that panel discussion ended, Njogu and Ngilu walked outside the theater where the forum was being held, and were promptly cornered by a pair of Kenyan journalists who’d been sent to cover Obama’s nomination. One of them had a television camera. Ngilu was a prominent member of the government back in Kenya. A decade ago, she was the first woman ever to run for the presidency of her country. Her presence in Denver was newsworthy back home.

“It’s so interesting to see how democracy has evolved in America,” Ngilu said into the camera. “It’s very mature, it’s peaceful and they are mostly talking about the issues.”

To her audience in Kenya, the minister was drawing an obvious comparison. Four years ago, a substantial contingent of Kenyan politicians—including Raila Odinga, a presidential aspirant—traveled to Boston to hear Obama speak. This year, Ngilu told me, many were kept at home by pressing domestic issues. The last Kenyan election, held last December, was riddled with fraud and disputed by Odinga, the supposed narrow loser, and devolved into horrifying ethnic violence. The country is now ruled by a quarrelsome coalition government that includes both Odinga and his opponent, President Mwai Kibaki, and is only slowly returning to normal. Ngilu, a member of Odinga’s party, said that Kenyans were looking at America’s election with some measure of envy.

One of the Kenyan reporters asked Ngilu about a recent report in the Nairobi newspaper The Nation that suggested that Raila Odinga had canceled plans to attend this Democratic convention because he was named in Jerome Corsi’s book ObamaNation. (Corsi reportedly described him as a “Muslim sympathizer with well-known communist political roots”.) In an apparent attempt to appropriate a little bit of the Obama aura, Odinga has claimed that he is the American candidate's distant cousin.

“I have not seen the book,” Ngilu replied. “I think we should not link our politics with American politics, because I think American politics are much higher than our village politics.”

Afterward, the two female politicians walked around the corner for lunch. Ngilu told me that she'd met Obama herself. When he visited the country last year as part of a senatorial mission to Africa, she escorted him on an excursion to a notorious Nairobi slum. Her friend Njogu said she’d been inspired by a speech Obama had given in which he’d talked frankly about Kenya’s ethnic divisions. The Obama family belongs to the Luo tribe, the one that rose up in Kenya after Odinga, also a Luo, was declared the loser of the 2007 election. During the crisis, Kenyans used to make a joke mordantly that the United States would have a Luo president before their country would.

“I’m seeing this kind of connection” between the Obama campaign and the Kenyan public, Ngilu said. “It’s like they all want to own him. They want him to understand that they expect so much of him.”

I mentioned that one line of attack on Obama, as Njogu had alluded to in her question to the panel, was the very thing that attracted the Kenyans to Obama—his unique roots.

“It’s going from what you know to what you don’t know,” Ngilu said. Then she added, jokingly, “Don’t put that sentence in because I will scare them.”

“I think, like the minister is saying, America is ripe for that real change,” Njogu added. “It presents a very big opportunity for Americans to really embrace growth. Because you can only grow when you move from your comfort zone.”

“For how long are the other nations of the world going to fear America?” the minister went on. “Maybe this is the person who the world has been waiting for, to bridge the gap."

Incidentally, Andrew Rice noted the same phenomenon in an Observer article about a delegation from Kenya at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex (Kate Beckinsale) start off the film as an engaged, repressed straight-arrow couple, recently graduated from Harvard Medical School. They've moved to Los Angeles to complete their medical studies and plan to stay in the home of Sam's mother, Jane (Frances McDormand), a veteran record producer who has promised them that her house will be empty. But when Sam and Alex arrive, Sam goes ballistic: He learns that his mother is still on the premises, trying to boost her faltering career with a hit featuring a British band whose lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), doubles as Jane's much younger lover.

The audience is gradually let in on the explosive back story of Sam's long-standing alienation from his mother: He thinks she was callously irresponsible as a wife and parent. Curiously, he seems never to have told Alex, his fiancée, about his deep hostility towards his mother, and Alex seems a little puzzled by all the uproar. Sam and Alex have also just come from a mysteriously frosty meeting with Alex's parents, so that all around us are people who don't seem capable of getting along with each other.

For their part, Alex and Jane seem to get along fairly well. The hitherto serious-minded Alex becomes increasingly fascinated with the free and easy ways of Jane, Ian and the other musicians. Alex also begins to display an independent streak at odds with our first impression of her and Sam as a close-knit couple. And while Alex stays home working on her dissertation, Sam goes off to the hospital for his duties as a psychiatric resident, where he quickly encounters a very attractive diversion in a fellow psychiatric resident named Sara (Natascha McElhone).

What rescues this situation from the formulaic banality it seems to be headed toward is the seriousness with which the filmmakers take the actual work being done by the various characters. It matters very much to Jane and Ian and the band that their recording succeeds, and as we listen to one rehearsal after another, we're gradually drawn into the suspense: Will it be a hit or a flop? For his part, Sam becomes deeply involved with a young male patient's psychotic episode, and the patient's terror at being found out by his mother. When Sam confronts mother and son together, he suddenly understands not only the son's psychotic episode, but also his own near-psychotic feelings about his mother. But every insight leads to a new dilemma, and by the end of the film, nothing has been conclusively resolved.

And yet, almost miraculously, no one behaves in a way that might be termed reprehensible. As in Jean Renoir's seminal The Rules of the Game, everyone has his reasons. Temptation is everywhere, all the time. Who will succumb? The work people do, and the direction of their goals, goes a long way in determining the success or failure of their closest emotional relationships.

Ms. McDormand is the latest of the marvelously middle-aged actresses playing characters who can look at the shrunken past and the shrinking future without losing sight of the passionate present. At times, she seems to linger in the swimming pool-as though by staying long enough, she can return her estranged son to the comforting amniotic fluid of her womb.

As for Mr. Bale's Sam, he's a character whose destiny must be decided by a newly liberated ex-Puritan suddenly endowed with the power to forgive and understand. Still, there are no guarantees in this admirably grown-up entertainment. Ms. Beckinsale's Alex may have unblocked her repressed sensuality, but perhaps at too high a price. Mr. Nivola's Ian is pleasant enough as a shameless poltergeist, but his psychic essence could easily degenerate into a tiresome facetiousness, especially if his career goes badly. Laurel Canyon is not about a beginning or an ending; it's closer to the middle-just before the hard decisions have to be made.

Intercontinental

Caroline Link's Nowhere in Africa, from her own screenplay, based upon a novel by Stefanie Zweig, is this year's German entry for the foreign-film Oscar, and if the past is any guide, it should be a shoo-in-think of all the Holocaust-related films honored in minor categories over the years. But there's more to this movie than its peripheral association with the Nazi slaughter. Ironies abound in this tale of adjustment to an alien existence on a remote continent.

The story here is more personal and intimate than in last year's Shanghai Ghetto , in which an entire Jewish community was transported to Shanghai. There, the Jewish interaction with the impoverished and oppressed Chinese slum dwellers introduced a global dimension. By contrast, Nowhere in Africa is almost a comedy of manners. An upper-class, German Jewish family is offered refuge on a farm in Kenya, a British colony, in the fateful year of 1938. This is a true story that like many such stories would be hard to invent, written as an autobiographical novel by Ms. Zweig from her own point of view as a child when her family's unusual emigration began. Ms. Link has retained the child's point of view, but has shifted the main focus to the parents, Walter and Jettel Redlich (Merab Ninidze and Juliane Köhler). Their daughter, Regina, is played by Lea Kurka and, when she's slightly older, by Karoline Eckerts.

The very dark comedy is provided by the reluctance of the somewhat sheltered Jettel to believe that a cultivated, socially active family from Germany can ever hope to settle down in a godforsaken place like East Africa. For a long time she believed, along with a huge number of similarly deluded European Jews, that the Nazi "pogrom," like so many others before it in European history, would soon run its course, and then everything would get back to normal. This is the same delusion Roman Polanski devastatingly records in the Warsaw ghetto of The Pianist.

Walter Redlich is the realist and the prophet in his family; he anticipates that things will get much worse before they get better, and so accepts the invitation to Kenya. The Redlichs' host is the far-sighted German-Jewish Süsskind (Matthias Habich), who sought sanctuary abroad in 1933, as soon as Hitler and his minions came to power. By leaving early, Süsskind was able to keep his money from the Nazis-a luxury no longer available to Jewish refugees in 1938. Despite Walter's instructions to Jettel to bring a small refrigerator with her to Kenya, his frivolous wife spends the money on a pretty frock.

To make matters more difficult, Walter has contracted malaria while awaiting the arrival of his wife and daughter. Fortunately, Süsskind is on hand with the proper medicine, and with the help of Walter's invaluable native cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), Walter survives and is in good enough health to welcome Jettel and Regina. Regina bonds immediately with the marvelously avuncular Owuor, as well as the many friendly African children elsewhere on the farm. The heart of the drama is in the transformation of Jettel and Regina from bourgeois German Jews, who believed they had become true Germans by abandoning their Orthodox customs, to full-fledged Africans with a love for the soil and the people.

Then comes an ironic twist: In 1939, when war is declared between England and Germany, the Redlichs are interned by the British authorities in Kenya. The British are comparatively benign in their treatment of the German Jews in their midst. Regina is admitted to a British religious school, and in a strikingly evocative scene, she and the other Jewish children are asked to take their seats at the side of the room while the rest of the children join in the singing of a Christian hymn. It's a delicate, ambivalent exclusion-and at the same time, a respectful gesture of consideration for non-Christian pupils.

A final irony: Once the war is over, Walter is invited by the German judiciary to return to Germany to help reform the legal system-but Jettel is unwilling to return to the people who allowed her mother and sister to die in the death camps. Walter and Jettel seem to have reached an impasse: Walter will go back alone to Germany, while Jettel and Regina stay behind. At this crucial moment, the entire valley is invaded by locusts, and Jettel and Regina fight side-by-side with their African friends and neighbors to save the harvest. Jettel suddenly sees that Walter has interrupted his journey to lend his arms and coat to drive off the locusts. By recommitting himself to the people who sheltered his family, Walter finds himself reconciled with Jettel, who then allows the final decision on their future to be made by him. Of course, they must return to Europe, but there's a palpable feeling of pain and loss when they do leave. Out a great historical evil comes a gentle fable of love and understanding between people literally continents apart.

Companions Aloft

Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration, a remarkable contemplation of the everyday miracle of birds in flight to and from every corner of the globe, required the services of five crews of more than 450 people, including 17 pilots and 14 cinematographers, to follow a variety of bird migrations through 40 countries and seven continents. Among the more familiar landmarks are the Eiffel Tower and Monument Valley, but there are forays to both poles, and more penguins than you can shake a stick at in that Antarctic restaurant where they were first discovered and mistaken for pompous headwaiters.

Winged Migration is a beautiful spectacle that makes one think of God and Darwin in the same breath. What marvelous creatures! And how powerfully motivated they must be to seek food for survival in such far-off places. They're a constant miracle to behold, and their kindness and generosity in allowing human intruders with their cameras to join them in such close proximity is a miracle in itself. Mercifully, there are only a few ugly moments when gunshots from below bring down our winged companions. For shame!