@2026 by mezzanine film, inc.
HISTOIRES D’AMÉRIQUE (AMERICAN STORIES: FOOD, FAMILY, PHILOSOPHY)
directed by Chantal Akerman
1988, Belgium, 92m, DCP
Mezzanine and This Friday co-present a special evening around Chantal Akerman’s underseen, revelatory portrait of Jewish-American immigrant life
With readings by Andrew Berardini, Olivier Misraje, and Vanessa Place
Friday, September 4
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
doors/bar: 7:30
readings: 8:00
film: 8:30
“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
Andrew Berardini is a writer out of Los Angeles. His poems, essays, and criticism ease into each other, shaped by class, illness, and pleasure. A contributor to Artforum and Mousse for two decades, he is the author of Relics (2015), a memoir-once-removed on Danh Võ, and Colors (2023), a literary atlas of 110 shades. He will begin this fall as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford.
Oliver Misraje is a writer from the Inland Empire of California. As the son of a preacher, Misraje’s work explores religious fundamentalism, and the human and environmental violence within the inland desert. Much of his fiction finds setting in places that embody the death of the California dream and particularly the communities left behind by prosperity.
Vanessa Place is a conceptual artist, librettist, and criminal appellate defense attorney specializing in murders and sex offenses. She was the first poet to perform as part of the Whitney Biennial; a content advisory was posted.
In French and English with English subtitles. A Janus Films release. Special thanks to Brian Belovarac, Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman.
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