Transit
Fri Aug 30, 2019
5:30 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
As a fascist occupation descends on France, refugeesincluding a German camp survivor who assumes a dead writers identity (Franz Rogowski) and the writers unwitting wife (Paula Beer)gather in the sunlit purgatory of Marseille, seeking passage out of an increasingly dangerous Europe. Its a classic scenario for a World War II thriller, but Christian Petzolds Transit is no period piece: although the story comes from a 1944 novel, the clothes, cars, and architecture, plus the prominence of North Africans among the dispossessed, all place the action in France today. More than an it-could-happen-here allegory, the film is a visually lucid, deeply unsettling evocation of displacementpolitical, psychological, even existential.