‘Transit’ – Refugee Portraits 3/3
To complete a trilogy of films that deal with migration and that paint refugee portraits I call your attention to Transit (2018) by the German filmmaker Christian Petzold. This little series of films started with Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, a tranquil, but dramatic description of waiting and hope, situated in Mauretania and focusing on those who leave and those who stay behind. Then I presented Atlantics by Mati Diop, situated in Dakar, Senegal, also seen from the African perspective, about people leaving driven by economic disparity and desperation and focusing on loss and despair among those who stay behind.
This third film Transit, although very different from the other two, deals with similar issues. It is about people who try to get away while others are hopelessly stranded and stuck, with people who do everything to get a hold of another identity, with people who lose empathy in order to free themselves from what they want to leave, with people who are plagued by guilt and shame because of those they leave behind.
Transit is adapted from the 1944 novel by the German anti-fascist writer Anna Seghers. It is about a German fugitive in Paris who flees to Marseille in order to find passage abroad by boat. It is a quite demanding, intellectual, but supurbly gripping film. Petzold has placed this historic story in the present. We know of the historic, threatening context but see no traces of SS-uniforms and of a 1940s urban milieu. This causes a strange dual feeling that it happened long ago while it also may happen here and now or soon to come.
Two supurb performances by Franz Rogowski who plays the fugitive Georg and of Paula Beer (whom we recognize from major roles in Francois Ozon’s Frantz and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away), together with the haunting realities of the refugee crisis in our time caused the film to linger in my mind for days. Transit confirms Christian Petzold as one of the major film directors of contemporary Europe.
Rinus, Dec 2019
*image posted under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the film
© Photo by Christian Schulz
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Thank you for this reminder about such an important topic that will not go away. I will add these films to my to-watch list. It seems that much of the current populism in Europe is driven by fears of migration, which I think would not be the case if we were to actually meet real migrants with names and hopes and longings. Maybe films like these will help create a much-needed counter-narrative.