In 1977 directors Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embarked on a journey through France to prepare their adaptation of Anna Segher’s exile novel Transit, making a ‘working journal with images’, as they described it. Their essayistic approach to film adaptation follows the escape route of German emigration from Nazi Germany (and Seghers’s own route), documenting the places, talking to witnesses, layering the past and the present. The result is a film in two parts, mixing fictional and documentary elements, and performing a thorough investigation of exile and cultural resistance against fascism during World War Two.
The screening will be introduced and followed by a conversation with the directors (tbc).