Transit
Christian Petzold In Person
March 16 - 21
Franz Rogowski stars in Christian Petzold’s haunting film as a European refugee who has escaped from two concentration camps and assumes the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying.
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. An NYFF56 selection. A Music Box Films release.
Watch Petzold discuss Transit at our 2018 retrospective.
Moody, beguiling, formally bold... turns history into an existential maze.
—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Spectacular... past and present feel like they exist almost simultaneously.
—Boyd van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter
Beguiling... like a remake of Casablanca as written by Kafka.
—David Ehrlich, IndieWire
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