Transit

Christian Petzold, Germany/France, 2018, 101 minutes

Rating: M

The film is based on a 1944 novel by the German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers, drawing on her experience as a refugee. The novel is set in WWII France, and follows its hero – a young German man who has escaped the camps – from Paris to Marseille, just before the Nazi occupation of the South of France…

But there is something uncanny about Transit as a whole – not least because the version of WWII France we see here appears to be taking place in the present, or something that looks like it. The cars and architecture are all very clearly contemporary, and the police wear riot gear and carry machine guns. And yet Weidel uses a typewriter, telephones are wired in, and the protagonists – all dressed in modern-day versions of 1940’s clothing…

In cooperation with Goethe Institut