Max Beckman. Transit Amsterdam

Each holding one suitcase, the German painter Max Beckmann and his wife fled Berlin in 1937. His work had been disqualified as Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) in Nazi Germany. For ten years, the world-famous but also in the Netherlands long reviled artist would live and work in Amsterdam. It was a tough but very productive period, in which he painted several of his masterworks. His canvasses, scrupulously shown in the film, demonstrate how he visualised his (war) experiences in stage-like, mythological images. In the voice-over, excerpts from his diary are read. Poetic cityscapes of contemporary Amsterdam are rhythmically alternated with archive images from World War II.