A Far Off Place

1993 film by Mikael Salomon

A Far Off Place (aka Far Off Place and Kalahari) is a 1993 American adventure drama film based on Laurens van der Post's works A Far Off Place (1974) and its predecessor, A Story Like the Wind (1972). It stars Reese Witherspoon, Ethan Randall, Jack Thompson and Maximilian Schell. The plot concerns three young teenagers who must cross the Kalahari Desert to safety when their parents are killed by a poacher. A Far Off Place was filmed in Namibia and Zimbabwe from May to September 1992. Kalahari Desert scenes were filmed in the Namib Desert, with additional locations at the Shamva Gold Mine outside Harare, and the Sesriem Desert in Namibia. The aircraft featured in A Far Off Place included a Cessna 180G Z WLK, a Bell 206B JetRanger III, ZS HAJ, a Cessna 421A Golden Eagle, Z WMB, and a Boeing 707 330B.

Walt Disney Pictures released the third Roger Rabbit animated short film, Trail Mix up, theatrically with A Far Off Place.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 42% based on reviews from 12 critics, with an average rating of 5 out of 10. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A " on an A+ to F scale. Film critic Roger Ebert criticized the plot and the level of violence. Awarding the film two stars, he singled out the film's premise which requires the characters to crossed 2,000 kilometers to find help: "As perhaps the only American film critic who has in fact crossed the Kalahari Desert, twice, I could have saved them a lot of trouble. There were dozens of towns and villages within 100 miles of their starting place, and Cape Town itself would have been less than 2,000 kilometers away". He also noted the film's similarities to the 1971 Australian film Walkabout.