Mezzanine and This Friday co-present a special evening around Chantal Akerman’s underseen, revelatory portrait of Jewish-American immigrant life: HISTOIRES D’AMÉRIQUE (AMERICAN STORIES: FOOD, FAMILY, PHILOSOPHY).
Directed by Chantal Akerman, 1989, Belgium, 92m, digital.
With readings (tba) curated by This Friday.
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“What are a Jewish girl’s three favorite things?” So asks a character in Chantal Akerman’s American Stories, her singular attempt to capture the essence of the modern American Jewish diaspora in all its hangdog melancholy and anecdotal bliss. A stark departure from the Jeanne Dielman filmmaker’s commitment to real-time duration, the film nevertheless embodies Akerman’s typical directness and absence of sentimentality, with an engaging series of monologues and hilarious sketches performed by Yiddish theater veterans and locals, brought together in an impressionistic stream. Conveying a genuine ethnographic curiosity, the film at times resembles Akerman’s similarly episodic Toute une nuit as filtered through Borscht Belt theatrics, with the idea of heritage constantly questioned and displaced among its characters. At a time when Jewish-American identity feels at its most fragmented, Histoires d’Amérique is notable as an authentic vision of Judaism without Zionism, and deserves to be appreciated as a film of Jewish folk tales par excellence. -Micah Gottlieb
In French and English with English subtitles. A Janus Films release. Special thanks to Brian Belovarac, Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman.
Presented by Mezzanine & This Friday
This is an 18+ event
