LOGLINE

Past and present merge in this alluring puzzle from Christian Petzold, which follows Georg (Franz Rogowski), a refugee from fascism who pursues Marie (Paula Beer), the wife of the dead man whose identity he has assumed.

SYNOPSIS

As fascism spreads, German refugee Georg (Franz Rogowski) flees to Marseille and assumes the identity of the dead writer whose transit papers he is carrying. Living among refugees from around the world, Georg falls for Marie (Paula Beer), a mysterious woman searching for her husband—the man whose identity he has stolen. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1942 novel, TRANSIT shifts the original story to the present, blurring periods to create a timeless exploration of the plight of displaced people.

DIRECTOR´S STATEMENT

The autobiography of Georg K. Glaser contains a 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 during the time in which the novel “Transit” by Anna Seghers was set. He fled to France and then to its unoccupied “free zone,” or “zone libre,” to which Marseille belonged.

Historical silence is akin to windlessness or still air: the breeze ceases to propel the sailboat, which is enveloped by the vast nothingness of the sea. The passengers have been expunged —from history and from life. They’re cornered in space and in time.

The people in TRANSIT have been cornered in Marseille, waiting for ships, visas, and further passage. They’re on the run—there’s no way back for them, and no way forward. Nobody will take them in or care for them. They go unnoticed—except by the police, the collaborators, and security cameras. They’re borderline phantoms, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow. The present flashes by without acknowledging them. Cinema loves phantoms. Perhaps because it, too, is a space of transit, an interim realm in which we, the viewers, are concurrently absent and present.

The people in TRANSIT long to be taken by the stream, the breeze, put into motion. They long for a story of their own and discover the fragment of a novel left behind by an author, the fragment of a narrative about flight, love, guilt, and loyalty. TRANSIT is a story about how these people turn this narrative into their own. — Christian Petzold