Key from Spain

Flory Jagoda, born into a Sephardic family in Bosnia, was given the gift of music by her mother. This documentary includes a trove of Ladino songs from medieval Spain beautifully interpreted by this gifted singer and storyteller, who now lives in the United States. Raised in the Jewish community of Sarajevo, which was 12,000 strong before the war, Flory and her immediate family fled when the Nazis occupied her country in 1941. After the war, she wrote a collection of songs that chronicles her people’s fate. The film follows her return to Sarajevo to deliver a stirring performance following the siege of 1992.

Ankica Petrovic is an Adjunct Professor in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. She studied ethnomusicology/anthropology at the University of Sarajevo and The Queen's University of Belfast. From 1979 to 1992 she taught ethnomusicology at the University of Sarajevo. Because of the great respect for her scholarly work, she was offered to leave her native Sarajevo on one of the Jewish rescue convoys during the recent war in Bosnia-Herzogovina. Since 1993 she has been teaching as a visiting professor at several American universities. Her scholarly expertise is in East European rural music, Jewish Sephardic culture of the Balkans, Bosnian Muslim music, religious chants, and cross-cultural studies in music and gender, and music and politics. She has produced numerous music, educational, and ethnographic programs at Radio-Television Sarajevo. "The Key From Spain" is her first American video-documentary project.