The Darkening of Europe: Afrofuturist Ambitions and Afropessimist Fears in Damir Lukacevic's Dystopian Film Transfer (2010)

is one of a handful of recent German films that use science fiction to respond to Germans' anxieties about the influx of refugees in the last ten years. Adapted from a short story by Spanish author Elia Barcelò, Transfer introduces a technology of body-swapping that allows wealthy, older, white customers to have their minds transferred into the younger, healthier bodies of Africans in order to prolong their lives. In this essay I analyze Transfer against the context of German science fiction film history and Germans' more recent interest in Afrofuturism to consider how Lukacevic uses the genre to critique contemporary German attitudes about race. By comparing the film's tragic ending to the short story's optimistic one, I argue that while there are several moments in the film that radically undermine German assumptions about race, identity, and nationality, the tragic ending sabotages potentially positive interventions in discussions about racism in Germany.