Transit (Christian Petzold, 2019)

Transit
(Christian Petzold, 2019, 101 min, Germany and France, German and French with English subtitles, DCP)

-- Introduction by Syed Habeeb Tehseen (Carolina-Duke, Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures)

In Christian Petzold’s brilliant and haunting adaptation of German novelist Anna Seghers’s 1944 book Transit, a hollowed-out European refugee (Franz Rogowski), who has escaped from two concentration camps, arrives in Marseille assuming the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying. He enters the arid, threadbare world of the refugee community, where he becomes enmeshed in the lives of a desperate young mother and son and a mysterious woman named Marie (Paula Beer). Transit is a film told in two tenses: 1940 and right now, historic past and immediate present, like two translucent panes held up to the light and mysteriously contrasting and blending.

“Transit invites viewers to trace their own speculative connections between Seghers' narrative and the contemporary rise in neo-Nazism and anti-refugee sentiment, all while its surtext remains achingly moving.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“Inhabiting a realm between the past and present, Europe and America, and also cinema and literature, [Petzold's characters] are, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, ‘living ghosts among the ruins of our times.’” – J. Hoberman

“[A] complex, urgent, ingenious movie … [that] makes the case for Petzold as the decade’s most exemplary foreign arthouse auteur.” – Adam Nayman

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