Screening of “Oh To Believe in Another World” with music by Shostakovich

А powerful, political evening bringing together Kentridge’s film and Shostakovich’s subversive Symphony No.10, with both works sharing themes of freedom against totalitarianism and oppression. Oh To Believe in Another World is an animated film to ‘illuminate and honour’ Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No.10, which premiered a few months after the death of Stalin and expresses the violence and dread of Russia’s years under the dictator’s regime.

Using collage, puppets and masked actors, artist William Kentridge creates a dream-like ‘Soviet museum’ to accompany the symphony, featuring a cast of characters including Lenin, Stalin and Shostakovich himself. Kentridge’s film is a retrospective look at the four decades of the 1920s – 1950s, from the perspective of 1953 when Stalin died and the first performance of the symphony was presented. Set inside what appears to be an abandoned Soviet museum, which in fact is made of cardboard, on the table in the artist’s studio, we move through the different halls of the museum, encountering Lenin, Trotsky, Mayakovsky and Stalin.

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