TRANSIT, with Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer in the lead roles, is freely adapted from Anna Seghers' novel of the same name. Director Christian Petzold, who also wrote the screenplay for the film version, reset the story of a German fleeing from the National Socialists to France during WWII to the present day.

German troops are about to occupy Paris. At the last moment, the German refugee Georg escapes to Marseille. In his bags, the personal effects of the author Weidel, whose fear of those on his heels has led him to commit suicide: a manuscript, letters, and a visa assurance from the Mexican embassy.

Only those who can prove that they will leave are permitted to be in Marseille. Visas for the possible receiving countries are in great demand, as are transit visas and the infrequent ticket for passage by ship. Georg remembers Weidel's papers, and assumes the dead man's identity. He submerges into the uncertain existence of transit. Refugees exchanging words in the corridors of the small hotel, in the consulates, and in the port cafés and bars. He befriends Driss, the son of Heinz, a comrade who died while on the run. Why travel further? Can a new life really be started elsewhere?

Everything changes when Georg meets and falls in love with the mysterious Marie. Is it devotion or expediency that has led her to share her life prior to the journey with the doctor Richard, even as she searches for her husband at the same time? He has, people say, surfaced in Marseille with Mexican visas for himself and his wife.

The director on his film:

The autobiography of Georg K. Glaser contains a truly wonderful sentence: "Suddenly, as my flight came to an end, I found myself surrounded by something I termed 'historical silence'." Georg K. Glaser was a German communist from the time in which Anna Seghers' novel TRANSIT is set. He fled to France, and then to country's unoccupied region.

"Historical silence" is analogous to no wind on the seas – the empty sails don't propel the boat, which is surrounded by the vastness and emptiness of the wide sea. And the passengers drop away, drop out of history, out of life itself. They become stuck – in space, in time.

The people in TRANSIT are stuck in Marseille, waiting for ships, visas and onwards passage. They are on the run, and there is no way back for them – and no way forward. Nobody will accept them, no one cares about them, no one even notices them – except the police, the collaborators, and the security cameras. They are on the verge of becoming phantoms, trapped between life and death, between yesterday and tomorrow. The present passes by without acknowledging them. Cinema loves phantoms, perhaps because the cinema is also a sphere of transition, an interim realm in which we, the viewers, are absent and present in tandem.

The people populating TRANSIT want to reenter the flow, the breeze, the movement. They want to have a story. They find the fragment of a novel left behind by an author: a fragment of a story about running away and love and guilt and loyalty. TRANSIT tells of how these people turn this narrative into that of their own.


Reviews and recommendations

"Time periods overlap in TRANSIT, sometimes they cross, but they never match completely. And this is how Petzold avoids simple analogies between the refugees of today and then. What he does is much more sophisticated, mysterious, powerful: the connections between the two eras work like echoes, as if the past reverberates in the present and vice versa."
(Libération)

"In the by now third film adaptation of the eponymous novel by Anna Seghers, Christian Petzold portrays exile as an interim of moral uncertainties and indelible desires. In doing so, he enmeshes history and the present in an intriguing dialogue."
(epd Film)

"The character of Marie and the actress playing her, Paula Beer, are of major influence when it comes to the film not always being completely congruent with its narrative. Time and again, the narrating voiceover tells us one version of the story even as we see something else, or even the opposite, transpire. It could be that one or the other version is not correct. Which in no way alters the fact that the film is just as congruent, or let us say consistent, as the narrative. And vice versa."
(Kolik Film)

Ralph Eue, 02.08.2018

Production Country

France (FR), Germany (DE)

Production Period

2017/2018

Production Year

2018

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:2,35 (CinemaScope)

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Literary Adaptation

Topic

National Socialism, Migration / Flight / Exile

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de), French (fr)

DCP

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Greek (el), Lithuanian (lt), Mongolian (mn), Thai (th)

Note on the Format

DCP sind verschlüsselt! Zusätzlich thailändische und englische UT gleichzeitig im Bild

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Greek (el), Lithuanian (lt), Thai (th)

DVD

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Greek (el), Lithuanian (lt), Mongolian (mn), Thai (th)

Note on the Format

mongol. UT auch auf DVD? -> laut DVD-Cover : nein.

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Greek (el), Lithuanian (lt), Thai (th), Chinese (short)