In 1991, TRANSIT LEVANTKADE screened at the Duisburg Film Week and as part of ZDF’s “Das kleine Fernsehspiel”. Rosemarie Blank’s film combines enacted scenes and historical material and is about the past and present of Levantkade in Amsterdam’s old harbor, from where people left to go to South America in the early 20th century as well as from where - not much later - the deportation of forced laborers was organized under the Nazi occupation. The “transit” of the title could connect Blank’s film with Anna Seghers’ 1941 novel, one of Harun Farocki’s favorites, as well as to Christian Petzold’s 2018 adaptation Transit (2018) and also to Fluchtweg nach Marseille by Ingemo Engström und Gerhard Theuring (1977). Showing the port as a zone of contact, a relay station of migration, a transient place, with alternative, nomadic ways of living, proves to be a productive task of film and/or of political historiography. (HaFI) (7.9.)
