American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy

The film is built from what Jewish New Yorkers tell. The speakers come from different generations and different lives. Each of them talks straight to the camera. What they tell are their own stories. Some describe the road of migration. Some describe the place they left behind. Some of the stories are sad and some are funny. The two are often inside the same account. Food passes through the conversations. So do family and belief. What is told appears to belong to single people. Laid one on another, though, a shared past emerges. Displacement and survival are part of that past. The film gives this without building one single story. Eszter Balint and Judith Malina appear in the ninety six minute film, a Belgian and French co-production Chantal Akerman finished in 1989.