This movie is a screen adaptation of East German writer Anna Seghers' novel about German refugees trying to get out of Marseilles in 1940. They are engaged in a life and death struggle to obtain required documents--visas, boat tickets, and transits. The action is intense but not overtly physical or violent; it is entirely driven by the desperate focus on documents. From what I learned from my own family and my reading, this is very accurate--and of course it is also a central theme in Casablanca. What makes this film version politically brilliant is that the 1940 plot and dialog are visually set in 2018 --in France today--as you will realize in the first five minutes of the movie when you see the cars, police uniforms, and restaurants of contemporary France. With this disjuncture of the audio (1940) and the visual (2018), the director makes us think about refugees and undocumented people today--it works in a way that is not at all preachy or heavy-handed, but very effective. A must see!
