Transit

Director: Christian Petzold

2018

30 June 2025

See

Georg (Franz Ragowski) assumes the identity of a dead writer to flee a Fascist invasion. Travelling from Paris to Marseilles and awaiting passage on a ship to America he keeps encountering the man’s wife Marie (Paula Beer) and other German refugees.

Think

A modern adaption of a WWII set story, the contemporary retelling is all the more disquieting. As are the reversals and setbacks of desperate people, dejected, trying to leave a place that doesn’t want them. There’s deaf mother Melissa (Maryam Zaree) and her son Driss (Lilien Batman) who Georg bonds with. Richard (Godehard Giese) a doctor who tends to the boy when he falls ill and is in a romantic relationship with Marie. And other refugees he has fleeting yet meaningful encounters with. A conductor, an architect, as well as the Mexican and American consuls, and the bartender who retells his story. 

Feel

The most meaningful scenes to me are the ones about the writer’s work, describing the experience of that time and place allegorically, which Georg recounts to the US Consul when asked about the last thing he wrote:

A dead man stands at the gates of hell, which are closed. He waits for them to open. He waits an hour. A day. A week. He stops a passerby and asks:

“Excuse me, I’m trying to get in to Hell, when will the gates be open?”

“But sir,” the passerby replies, “you’re already in Hell.”