Histoires D’amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy

Born in Brussels in 1950 to a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Chantal Akerman never really shook off the influence of her roots. In film after film, she would return obsessively to this, either in terms of her own family history or the wider nature of Jewish life in the post-Holocaust era. Histoires D’amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy takes us on the immigrant’s journey, where yearning for the Old World appears on the edge of the city where everything is possible. Broken identities, they stand between the Old World and the new, marked by one, not yet belonging to the other. Fiction permeates past and present. Humor breaks out between often-tragic stories. A constant movement connects the tragic to the comic, and back again, and life is always tackled with force because life must go on. Restored by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique under the supervision of Luc Benhamou (DOP).