Fluchtweg nach Marseille

“The film’s theme is the escape route for German emigration in France in 1940/41. The film describes a research process before the backdrop of landscapes and cities that were once the location of persecution. The leitmotif of the journey is the novel Transit by Anna Seghers. The principle of progress and discovery is the moving and speaking photography.” (Engström/Theuring). When the film was released in the United Kingdom, Steve Neale wrote: “FLUCHTWEG NACH MARSEILLE is a film that has to do with borders, hurdles, separations, and thus also with the figures of exile, escape, and passage, whether directly or indirectly, literally or metaphorically. Borders, hurdles, separations: between countries, states, and political regimes; between past and present, history and memory, then and now: between fact and fiction, fiction and documentary, narration and interruption, the utterance and the said.” The film received the Josef von Sternberg Prize at the Internationale Mannheimer Filmwochen in 1977.