Cosmos Ottinger movie program - Exile Shanghai (Part 1)

Six biographies of German, Austrian and Russian Jews that intersect at their common point of escape, Shanghai. Narratives, photos, documents and new images from the largest and most contradictory metropolis in the Far East form a whole in which historical exile takes on a topical relevance.

Slowly and carefully, the film approaches the city like a traveler from the sea, observing the harbor, lingering on European-looking facades, long shots of markets, city traffic, a soup kitchen. It tells of a present absence that has left delicate traces - that of the Jews in Shanghai. A fragment of a city history about which both Chinese historiography and that of the diaspora have so far remained silent. Ottinger brings it back to life by letting people talk, giving them plenty of time to tell their personal and general stories.

Shanghai has experienced three waves of Jewish immigration: a commercial one in the 19th century by the Sephardim and two of flight from Eastern European pogroms and the German genocide. Today they are displaced again; some by the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, the others by the Chinese reconquest in the 1950s.

Ulrike Ottinger visited them in their new residences in California and let them report on camera: Of the struggle for work and daily survival, of German-language magazines and Chinese coal stoves, of Viennese bakeries and Berlin sausage kitchens, of the misery of renewed ghettoization, but also of the luxury of the colonial existence that some of them enjoyed.