| In Transit | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Tom Roberts |
| Produced by | Jimmy de Brabant Michael Dounaev Kami Naghdi |
| Written by | Natalia Portnova Simon van der Borgh |
| Starring | Thomas Kretschmann John Malkovich Daniel Brühl Ingeborga Dapkunaite Vera Farmiga |
| Music by | Dan Jones |
| Cinematography | Sergei Astakhov |
| Editing by | Paul Carlin |
| Distributed by | To be announced |
| Release date(s) | To be announced |
| Running time | 'Ca. 108 Min' |
| Language | English |
In Transit (also known as In Tranzit) is a film based on the true story of German prisoners of war in a Russian work camp after World War II. The film was directed by Tom Roberts, and stars Thomas Kretschmann, John Malkovich, Daniel Brühl, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, and Vera Farmiga.
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The film tells the story of German prisoners of war who are mistakenly taken to a Russian transit women's prison, which temporarily contains women before they are sent to the Gulag. The prison's wardens are women, who want to take revenge on the German soldiers who killed their loved ones during the war. As time passes, the female wardens overcome their hatred for the prisoners and begin to treat them as ordinary people, including engaging in intimate relationships with them. A major theme is the Soviet search for SS officers among the German POWs. The film neglects to mention that many SS men had their blood type tattooed on their arms to allow for swift blood transfusions and so SS men were often easy to identify, see the article SS blood group tattoo.
There are several events in the movie that are not very likely to have taken place. For example, when NKVD colonel Pavlov (John Malkovich) holds a speech before the public hanging of two SS men from the camp, he says that 8 May is the anniversary for the victory over Nazi Germany, whereas the USSR announced the victory on 9 May 1945 and this date has since then always been the date of Victory Day in Russia. The hanging is taking place in the very city centre of Leningrad (now St-Petersburg) right in front of the Peter and Paul Fortress, another event not very likely to have taken place. NKVD usually executed people secretly in places of detention, and by shooting, not by hanging. The public hanging depicted in the movie is more reminiscent of those perpetrated in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union by the Nazis during the war. At the end of the movie, presumably some time in the spring of 1947, lieutenant Elena (Thekla Reuten) enters the office of doctor Natalia (Vera Farmiga) and tells her that "Stalin has made yet another new agreement with the allies" and that "We're sending all the Germans back home". Natalie has already lost her husband Andrej (Yevgeni Mironov), first to mental delusion (supposedly as a result of a head wound obtained during the war) and then when NKVD colonel Pavlov arrests him. Now she also looses her other love, the German POW Max (Thomas Kretschmann). Max and all the other POWs are loaded on a truck and transported off back to Germany. In reality however, the German POWs were held for at least ten years and were released only in 1955, two years after Stalin's death.
The Russian movie Polumgla (2006) had a similar plot about the relationship between German POWs and local women in the remote Soviet village of Polumgla in Archangel province. In Polumgla the locals consist almost entirely of women. The events in this movie unfolds in 1944, which explains why there are no men in the village, since they are all mobilised to military service. Polumgla ends with a detachment of NKVD soldiers arriving and declearing that the war is over and radio antenna the POWs have been working on for a year is no longer of any use. Therefore all the German POWs, who meanwhile have become intimate with the village women, are marched off into the woods and executed.
The movie will be released direct-to-DVD in Australia on February 2, 2010.[1]