Documentary Based on Adler Project Will Premiere in the Shanghai International Film Festival

Visit from China, a documentary based on “The Adler Project”, produced by Austrian filmmaker and director Paul Rosdy, will be premiered in the INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA unit of the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), June 14-23, 2024.

“The Adler Project” was created by Fang Sheng, a translator, personal history researcher and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Fang Sheng intends to use this Project to trace his family history, and to pay tribute to his parents’ generation of Chinese classical musicians and their Jewish teachers who exiled to Shanghai during WWII. Among the over 400 Jewish refugee musicians, there was one particular man that was the focus of Fang Sheng’s early research. Ferdinand Adler, a Hungarian Jewish violinist who fled Nazi annexed Austria and exiled to Shanghai, became a concertmaster of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, the predecessor of today’s Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. From 1946 to 1947, Ferdinand Adler and some of his orchestra colleagues, joined the faculty of the State Conservatory of Music Junior Program, and taught many Chinese young students, many of whom war orphans, including Fang Sheng’s father, Sheng Mingliang, who later became a professional violinist of the China Central Philharmonic Society, today’s China National Symphony.

In 2018, when searching for Ferdinand Adler’s surviving families, Fang Sheng connected with Paul Rosdy, who had co-produced The Port of Last Resort (1998), a documentary about exiled European Jews in Shanghai, in which Ferdinand Adler had been featured. In producing that film, Paul Rosdy had come to know Adler’s daughter Christina, who had provided Paul with valuable information and materials.

Paul Rosdy in turn introduced Christina Adler to Fang Sheng, who, in March 2018, visited and interviewed Christina in Kufstein, Austria. The exchange between the two helped piece together the missing parts of each family’s history. The filmed session became the basis of Paul Rosdy’s new production Visit from China, a documentary that highlights the life and experiences of Jewish refugee musicians during WWII in Shanghai.

This year’s Shanghai International Film Festival will be featuring over 450 films from across the world.

(Title photo: During the interview, Fang Sheng connects Christina with his parents via the internet.)