Out of Africa - what we can learn from this great movie
Ralf Haller
October 17th, 2009
Ever so often I take out some older DVDs to watch them. Last night I picked one of my favorites, Out of Africa (from 1985, 7 oscars), with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. I asked myself then why is this such a great movie. Obviously great actors and one of my favorite actresses: Meryl Streep, who plays a baroness from the “small country next to Germany”, Denmark. Bored, feeling trapped in a men-ruled world, she decides - strangely - to break out of it all by marrying “her lover’s brother” and following him to Kenya where the British were operating a colony at the time.
Here a list of what I think makes this a great movie and what you can learn from it if you are in product marketing and also trying to run a campaign that gets attention, makes a difference and will be remembered:
- Something unknown: Africa and what to expect there are as interesting for the audience as for Karen Blixen
- Story: clearly a great story is told in this movie, and in addition Karen Blixen is a great story teller
- Adventure: going to Kenya at the time was clearly a big adventure and I suppose one of the main reasons, next to the bad weather in England, why they went there
- Love: great love story, no great movie without that
- Freedom: flying above the endless colorful African grasslands and mountains must be a fantastic experience; I always enjoyed flying across the flat land expanding from the Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevada in a small plane, but to do this in Africa must be even more stunnin
- Beauty: beautiful actors and landscape as mentioned
- Drama: love alone won’t be enough, only the opposite makes it like a real life story
- Women in work life: clearly Karen Blixen is in her time what many working women are in business life today: independence-seeking, competent, hard working, fact-oriented, apolitical, detail-observing, listening, good communicators, tough but fair…, an interesting subject for many, not only women
Enjoy the weekend.
Kenya picture, courtesy of Ben Heine.