Film Screening
Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring: Escape Route to Marseille

In Cinema

Sat, 04.12.2021
2:00 PM GMT Goethe-Institut London

We are very pleased to finally present Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring’s Escape Route to Marseille together with the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and the Essay Film Festival. The original screening was planned to take place during the Essay Film Festival in 2020 but had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. 

In 1977 directors Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embarked on a journey through France to prepare their adaptation of Anna Segher’s exile novel Transit, making a 'working journal with images', as they described it. Their essayistic approach to film adaptation follows the escape route of German emigration from Nazi Germany (and Seghers's own route), documenting the places, talking to witnesses, layering the past and the present. The result is a film in two parts, mixing fictional and documentary elements, and performing a thorough investigation of exile and cultural resistance against fascism during World War Two.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Helen Hughes, Senior Lecturer in German and Film Studies, University of Surrey,  Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film Studies, Birkbeck, University of London,  and Michael Temple, Reader in Film & Media Studies, Birkbeck University of London.

In association with the Germn Screen Studies Network.


2.00 – 3.30 pm    Escape Route to Marseille Part 1 (90 mins)
3.30 – 3.45 pm    Break
4.00 – 6.00 pm    Escape Route to Marseille Part 2 (120 mins)
6.00 – 7.00 pm    Discussion

Book Tickets Through Eventbrite
Escape Route to Marseille, Images from a working journal (1977) on the novel Transit (1941) by Anna Seghers. West Germany 1977, Colour, DCP (16mm), Part 1: 90 mins, Part 2: 120 mins. With English subtitles. Directors: Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring. With Katharina Thalbach, Rüdiger Vogler, Francois Mouren-Provensal. Witnesses Hamburg: Ruth Fabian, Paris; Peter Gingold, Frankfurt; Alfred Kantorowicz / Witnesses Paris: Ernst Erich Noth, Frankfurt; Ida und Vladimir Pozner.