Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin have been bringing audiences to their feet throughout the US and Europe with their unique and stirring violin and piano scores for Jewish-themed silent films. Sosin is one of the world’s top silent film musicians, and Svigals is the world's leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics.  After meeting at a silent film festival in Italy, the two soon recorded their first original score for the 1923 German film The Ancient Law, followed by City Without Jews and The Man Without a World.

The City Without Jews, (Die Stadt ohne Juden) H. K. Breslauer’s 1924 silent masterpiece, is based on the bestselling dystopian novel by Hugo Bettauer.  It was produced two years after the book’s publication and, tragically, shortly before the satirical events depicted in the fictional story transformed into all-too-horrific reality.   All complete prints were thought to be destroyed, but thanks to the discovery of a nitrate print in a Parisian flea market in 2015, this “lost” film can once again be appreciated in its unfortunately ever-relevant entirety.     Set in the Austrian city of Utopia (a thinly-disguised stand-in for Vienna), the story follows the political and personal consequences of an anti-Semitic law passed by the National Assembly forcing all Jews to leave the country. At first, the decision is met with celebration, but when the citizens of Utopia eventually come to terms with the loss of the Jewish population – and the resulting economic and cultural decline – the National Assembly must decide whether to invite the Jews back. Though darkly comedic in tone and stylistically influenced by German Expressionism, the film nonetheless contains ominous and eerily realistic sequences, such as shots of freight trains transporting Jews out of the city. The film’s stinging critique of Nazism is part of the reason it was no longer screened in public after 1933. For a more in-depth look: https://www.flickeralley.com/screenings/the-city-without-jews/