“Based on one of the best novels to come out of the German immigration - Anna Seghers' ‘Transit,' written in 1941 in pre-Occupation Marseille - Flight to Marseille (starring Katharina Thalbach and Rudiger Vogler) is a film notable for the memories it keeps alive. Memories of the flight of millions from the North of France to the South; memories of those killed before they could escape, including the poet Ernst Weiss, Walter Hasenclever, Rudolf Leonhard, and Walter Benjamin; Spain in 1936; the camp of horrors, Le Vernet 1939/42; the Collaboration and the Résistance: these are evoked with a minimum of images and the briefest commentary. Places of death, spiritual cities of retaliation...places of opposition, landscapes of the Résistance. And again and again, the key word, ‘Transit': ‘Permission to travel through a country.'” --excerpt from Berlin Film Festival note by Walter Fabian