Sydney Pollack has directed fourteen films, including They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice and Tootsie. As we go to press, he is tentatively scheduled to appear at our benefit screening of his newest film, Out of Africa, a moving adaptation of Isak Dinesen's renowned memoirs. Meryl Streep portrays Karen Blixen (Dinesen was her maiden name, Isak her nom de plume), who moves to Kenya in 1914 to start a coffee plantation with her husband, Baron Bror Blixen (played by Austrian actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer). After the breakup of their marriage, she remains in Kenya, eventually falling in love with a safari guide, Denys Finch Hatton, played by Robert Redford. The mood and feel of the Africa she loved and wrote about is beautifully evoked in Pollack's film, which was shot almost entirely in Kenya, outside of Nairobi. Screenwriter Kurt Luedtke (Absence of Malice) deftly wove together details from her memoirs and two biographies (one on Dinesen, one on Hatton) to create a rich portrait of the noted Danish writer's life.