As we go to press, we haven't yet seen Chantal Akerman's just-completed film. But her impressive body of work over the last fifteen years, including such films as Jeanne Dielman, News from Home and All Night Long, makes us confident her first English-language film is sure to be of interest. In these "American stories" Akerman draws inspiration from the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Set in a New York tethered to both past and present, the film explores the links between storytelling and cultural identity. Akerman explains: "Instead of learning my family's story directly from my parents, I had to turn to literature-Singer, for example. But his memories weren't exactly mine, so I made up my own; this film is about memory, but an invented one. I'm part of the postwar generation whose parents wanted to forget. To spare their children, they cut off all living contact with their Jewish roots and left them only the name Jew, devoid of content... What's really behind this forgetting? I probably won't ever really know. But what that question evokes in me is what's in this film: stories, funny stories, sometimes consoling stories, stories which have permitted people to survive history by laughing-laughing although the source is distress."