Fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris, Georg escapes to Marseille, where he assumes the identity a dead author whose papers have come into his possession. These documents include a transit visa to another country and allow him to stay in the port city from where many others are hoping to escape from Europe and the advance of fascism. Alone and waiting for a ticket, he meets others who, like him, are waiting for their chance. He gets to know them in the bars and consulate waiting rooms. One of them is the mysterious Marie who keeps on crossing his path and who he falls in love with. She is looking for her husband, a writer, who has the papers for her to get on a ship and who was supposed to meet her in Marseille...
After his last film
Phoenix, which is set in Berlin just after World War II, Christian Petzold has, with his new film, moved a few years backwards in time and chosen a location away from central Europe to a port city where refugees leave and enter the continent, a place of limbo where people exist between leaving and arriving. He has also made the bold choice to have his war time emigrants move through today's Marseille thus pointing at the perpetual cycle of war, persecution and migration.
Germany, France 2018, colour, 101 mins. With English subtitles.
Director: Christian Petzold. Screenplay Christian Petzold based on the novel Transit by Anna Seghers (1942).
With Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt,
Louison Tresallet, Violette Maurel.
.
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