Set in the Vienna-like city of Utopia, this film follows the political and personal consequences of an anti-Semitic law to expel the city’s Jews. Pushed onto trains with whatever belongings they could carry, forced against their will into an uncertain future, these scenes seem eerily prescient today.
The film had its final screening in Amsterdam in 1933, as a protest against the Nazis – after which it was thought that every copy had been destroyed. Miraculously, in 2015 a complete print of the film was discovered in a Paris flea market. Beautifully restored by the Austrian Film Archive – and almost exactly a century after its Vienna premiere – this disturbing and unique film now has its first screening in Manchester.
Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin have been bringing audiences to their feet throughout the U.S. and Europe with their unique and stirring violin and piano scores for Jewish-themed silent films. Sosin is one of the world’s finest silent film musicians; Svigals is the world’s leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics.