On behalf of Music Box Films, you are cordially invited to attend the final screening of TRANSIT, Christian Petzold’s haunting modern day adaptation of Anna Seghers’s 1942 novel Transit Visa. Starring Franz Rogowski (HAPPY END) and Paula Beer (NEVER LOOK AWAY; FRANTZ) as would-be lovers desperate to escape an occupied France, the film premiered at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival and went on to play the 2018 Toronto and New York film festivals. Music Box Films will open TRANSIT on Friday, March 1 in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center followed by a national roll out.
As fascism spreads, Georg (Rogowski), a hollowed-out German who has escaped from two concentration camps, flees to Marseille and assumes the identity of a dead novelist whose transit papers he is carrying. Living among refugees from around the world, Georg falls for Marie (Beer), a mysterious woman searching for her husband – the man whose identity Georg has stolen. TRANSIT is a film told in two tenses: 1940 and right now, transposing the original story to the present, and blurring periods to create a timeless exploration of the plight of displaced people.
A founding member of the loose movement known as the Berlin School, Christian Petzold makes films that are at once intricately engaged with the real world and steeped in cinema history. They reimagine such genres as film noir, thriller, melodrama, and the spy drama, offering narrative mysteries, and enigmatic protagonists, as well as surprising links between Germany’s turbulent past and its fragile present. Petzold’s films, including TRANSIT, were the focus of a November 2018 retrospective titled The State We Are In at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Watch the Trailer here