Oscar-winning director Caroline Link is one of Germany’s top talents, skilled at captivating audiences with powerful images and gripping stories. The West Coast premiere of her new movie “Exit Marrakech” will be on January 14, 2015 at the Clinton Street Theater as part of our monthly film series.

Caroline Link was born in Bad Nauheim in 1964 and studied at the University of Television & Film in Munich. Her graduation film Sommertage (’91) won the Kodak Award at the Hof Film Festival. Her 1996 feature debut Beyond Silence (Jenseits Der Stille) was nominated in 1998 for the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and received the Bavarian Film Award, the German Film Award in Silver, and the Guild Film Award in Gold, among other commendations. Her second feature film was Annaluise and Anton (1999), based on a novel by Erich Kästner.

Her third feature film, Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), adapted by Link from the autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig and shot on location in Kenya, received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as five German Film Prizes (Deutscher Filmpreis), including Best Feature Film.

While at the HFF, Munich’s prestigious film school, Caroline Link met her husband, director Dominik Graf, and it was as his assistant that she learnt her craft. In fact, their directorial approaches couldn’t be more different. But Graf says he admires the seemingly effortless quality of her work and the intuitive way she goes about writing her scripts. Given her success, critics and audiences have high expectations of any new Link movie.

“Exit Marrakech” is a father/son relationship drama and a road movie through Morocco. 17-year-old Ben and his father have little in common, so when Ben visits his dad on a theatre tour in Marrakech, he decides to escape with a young Berber girl, Karima, to the Atlas Mountains. His father starts looking for his son, and when they both finally find each other in the desert, it is the beginning of a careful approach towards each other.