tatiana pentes...strange cities

...Through the disclosure of evidence, Sahsa dreams, discovers, remembers the exilic identity of her grandparents Xenia and Sergei Ermolaeff (a composer and orchestra leader) in fragments and traces of their music, memories, personal effects and photographs, in their struggle to survive the Russian and Communist Revolutions. The inspiration of the work is a tune of the same name - a musical illustration, an imaginary vision of old Shanghai, Chinese metropolis, and International Settlement, conjuring mythic, filmic, musical and personal images of the city port...

...The musical score was first performed by a jazz orchestra of White Russian emigres in the cabarets of the International Settlement of Shanghai, China in the 1930s and 40s. Strange Cities draws upon the legacy of the Shanghai milieu, the Chinese gangster film, a musical cabaret genre, orientalist erotic literature, intrigue novels, and the films of Josef von Sternberg. Coined capital of the international underworld, the city of Shanghai became a seductively strange locale symbolised in the Western imagination, in reality the city was most often the final port of call for political refugees...

Producer: Eurydice Aroney

...Mac compatible...