"Every man, every woman," suggests writer Edward Abbey, "carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary." As a child, Kuki grew up in Italy listening to stories her father told her of Africa. After surviving a terrible automobile accident as a young woman (Kim Basinger), she meets Paolo (Vincent Perez), an adventurous man who asks her to marry him and move to a ranch in Kenya.
As Kuki says in a voiceover, "We cannot choose where we are born but we can choose where we live and where we die." Although her rich mother (Eva Marie Saint) doesn't want her daughter to be subjected to the dangers of the wild, Kuki and her young son Emanuele (Liam Aiken) leave Venice behind. She and Paolo purchase a ranch and begin their new life with great determination. She learns to speak Swahili and relates to the Africans in the surrounding areas when her husband goes on long hunting trips. She chases away the animals that are eating her vegetable garden. She comes to see how fragile existence can be on the African plains. A pet dog is killed by a lion. Poachers roam their property murdering elephants and rhinos for their tusks.
I Dreamed of Africa is based on Kuki Gallmann's 1991 memoir. It has been adapted for the screen by Paula Milne and Susan Shilliday and directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes). They have fashioned a fascinating and heart-affecting film about the art of belonging to a place or, as essayist Scott Russell Sanders has put it, "a knitting of self and world." The same writer notes: "The land is not merely a backdrop for the human play, not merely a source of raw materials, but is the living skin of the earth. Through this skin we apprehend a being that is alien, a life unfathomable and uncontrollable, and at the same time a being that is kindred, flesh of our flesh."
As a wife and a mother, Kuki is challenged to draw upon all her reserves of patience, courage, and love as one tragedy after another batters her soul. She learns the harsh rhythms of life and death in Kenya where the wildness of the place is beautiful and terrible and mysterious. By the end of the film, she regards Africa itself as kin. I Dreamed of Africa shows how our multileveled relationship with a place can be spiritual — adding a depth and richness to all our days.