The White Countess is a 2005 drama film directed by James Ivory. The screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro focuses on a disparate group of displaced persons attempting to survive in Shanghai in the late 1930s.
Having escaped the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskya is working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Shanghai bar to support her family of White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Despite the fact employment is scarce and her meager income is the family's only source of revenue, Sofia's once-aristocratic relatives scorn her for her choice of profession and insist she keep it a secret from her child.
Sofia eventually meets Todd Jackson, a former official of the U.S. State Department who recently lost his wife and children in separate terrorist bombings. The bombing that killed his child also left him blind. Using his substantial winnings from a well-placed bet at the racetrack, he opens an elegant nightclub catering to the cosmopolitan upper class and invites Sofia to work for him as his primary hostess, an offer she accepts, and in honor of her he
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