A 1940s refugee novel, filmed in today's Marseille

Transit was made in 2018 by Christian Petzold, a German writer and director, and it is a story about refugees fleeing the Nazis that takes place in present-day France. It premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival on 17 February 2018. The plot comes from a novel of the 1940s, but the streets, the cars and the police are modern, so the past and the present share the same frame.

Georg, a German refugee, reaches Marseille carrying the papers of a writer named Weidel, who has died. He takes the dead man's identity to use his visas and waits, like everyone around him, for a ship out of Europe. Then he falls for Marie, the wife who is still searching for her husband. Franz Rogowski plays Georg and Paula Beer plays Marie.

Where does the story come from?

The source is Transit, a novel by Anna Seghers, a German communist writer of Jewish descent. She fled the Nazis to Paris, escaped to Marseille when Paris fell in 1940, and reached Mexico about a year later. In Marseille she spent her days in consulates and waiting rooms, and the book draws on what she saw there. It was first published in English in 1944.

The book mattered to Petzold for decades. He has said it was a reference for almost all the projects he made with Harun Farocki, the German filmmaker who was his longtime co-writer. They decided to adapt it together a year before Farocki died in 2014, and the film is dedicated to him.

Why set a wartime story in the present?

Petzold's previous film, Phoenix, was a period drama, and he said he did not feel like making another historical movie. In a 2019 interview he quoted the French director Jean Renoir: all movies are contemporary, and there is no such thing as a period picture.

So the film keeps the novel's wartime plot and its hunt for papers and exit visas, but there are no recreated 1940s streets and no soldiers or tanks, only modern police cars. The review in Screen Daily, the British film trade paper, summed the effect up as both then and now. Critics have traced a direct line to the European refugee crisis: a film where the ghosts of the 1940s walk through the present.

Why Marseille?

Petzold said the producer wanted to shoot in Le Havre, a cheaper option, but he insisted on Marseille, the port where Seghers herself had waited. He said he filmed among refugees from North Africa living in the city without papers, near plaques on houses marking where refugees of the 1940s had lived. The refugee crisis, he said in a 2019 interview, was the subject that changed everything for him.

The story is told by a barkeeper, played by Matthias Brandt, who listens to the stories of the people passing through. Petzold described the bartender as "our history", someone who keeps what the refugees leave behind.

What happened when it came out?

The film opened in German cinemas on 5 April 2018. Music Box Films released it in US theatres on 1 March 2019, which is why some listings, Relay's included, date it 2019. It earned about $815,000 at the US box office, a small arthouse release for a film that had competed at Berlin.

Who is it for?

It suits anyone who likes slow, tense dramas about love and survival, and anyone curious about how an old story reads in a new century. It needs no knowledge of the war or the novel. It runs 102 minutes.

Drama