Histoires d’Amérique

Shot in New York, Akerman’s first English-language film Histoires d’Amérique conjures up an informal history of Jewish life over the past 100 years through a series of eyewitness accounts, re-created by a group of largely unknown actors. All are Jewish of the first and second generation and all have jokes, stories and anecdotal proof from real-life testimony that something that defines them has survived, despite loss, trauma and death. This may be the new world, but the horror of the old is never far from the surface. Akerman once said, “When history becomes impossible to bear, there is only one thing to do: send yourself up and laugh.”