Transit, Christian Petzold’s adaptation of Anna Seghers’s 1942 novel Transit Visa, stars Frank Rogowski, in a role that should help making him an international player, due to his good looks, strong physical presence, and commanding persona.
Selected for the New York, Toronto and Berlin Film Fests, Transit will be released by Music Box Films in spring 2019 in N.Y. add L.A., followed by national rollout.
Rogowski plays Georg, a German who has escaped from two concentration camps. He arrives in Marseille assuming the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying.
Unfolding as a melodrama, the film then centers on his life in a refugee community, specifically how he gets involved with a desperate and mysterious young mother, Marie (Paula Beer), raising a son.
Transit is told in two tenses: the historic past circa 1940 and the immediate present. The melodrama offers at once a personal and collective portrait of an unsettling life on the run, inevitable historical traumas, and the uncertainty and loneliness of the refugee experience. As such, Transit is both a film about a particular historical phenomenon as well as more universal commentary on the global refugees crisis at present.
About Director Christian Petzold
A founding member of a film movement known as the Berlin School, Christian Petzold studied Theater and German philology as well as Directing at Berlin’s German Film and Television Academy. He has directed narratives in various genres, film noir, spy thriller, and melodrama, often dealing with the same themes, the inevitable connection between Germany’s turbulent past and its shifting present. His eight features include Jerichow, Barbara, and Phoenix.