The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, himself once an immigrant in New York, wrote that NYC is 'not a city, not a country, but all humanity in one drop.'  THE CITY explores this ‘humanity,’ now, in New York City, through the unique eyes of non-native New Yorkers, exiles, immigrants, refugees, eccentrics, and a Ghost.

An anarchist fire-eater, struggling to keep Vaudeville alive, a legendary Norwegian dominatrix who did work with Mother Theresa, a sixteen-year-old refugee from war-torn Sierra Leone observing the tragedy of 9/11, a famous actress and her mother squatting in the East Village for 19 years, one of the three female stock traders on the Wall Street floor, who happens to be from India, a Turkish soul healer who fell in love with the city, a French Muay Thai kickboxer, who won the silver medalfor the US in Thailand ….

What do these sometimes quirky and all the time unique individuals have in common?  They are the strangers in a city now their own, who have molded the space surrounding them, sculpting New York into livable creations.  They are tough and damaged.  They are joyous and celebratory.  They, and many others, are the exceptional, the peculiar, but in this city, they are also the “common.”

Our guide is Eric Krupnik, a native of the Republic of Georgia, who migrated to NYC in 1946.  It has been written that Eric is “the rat of New York City.”  From prison to the highest echelons of society, there is no one he hasn’t met and befriended; there is no magic he can’t make happen just by bringing these people together. Eric, who stopped speaking the five languages he knew as a child so that he could “fit in,” now offers his unique views about the City. A solitary soul, accompanied by a ghostly chronicler of the past, Eric roams the streets of New York, setting into action the proverbial six degrees of separation by crossing paths with a diverse and motley crew of characters.

The struggles to make it in this new environment which is NYC, to survive, to make it "one's own" is to jump into its kaleidoscope, bound by the proximity of the urban space and opportunity that NYC provides. In this film, we touch on their shared experiences;  their diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and conflicts become the metaphors for the "human life drama," laid bare in all its intensity in New York.

Accompanied by haunting visuals, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, and a unique score by Sxip Shirey’s “mutant harmonica,” THE CITY is also a visual poem to a city of immigrants, which keeps re-inventing itself through its history, and into the new century.