Film info: América América
Film Information
Original Title | América América |
---|---|
English Title | |
Director | Elia Kazan |
Country | ![]() |
Year | 1963 |
Format | 35 mm |
Colour | B&W |
Duration | 164 min |
Cast:
- Stathis Giallelis, Frank Wolff, Elena Karam, Lou Antonio, John Marley
Production:
- Guión: Elia Kazan
- Fotografia: Haskell Wexler
- Montaje: Dede Allen
- Producción: Elia Kazan
Synopsis
"It's my favorite of all the films I've made; the first film that was entirely mine", said Kazan when asked about America America, a film based on his own novel about the journey one of his uncles made from Anatolia to New York. The story of Greek man Stavros begins in the last decade of the 19th century, when he travels to Istanbul to, ironically, escape from Turkish persecution; like many others did back then, he saw it as a stopover to get as far away as possible. What’s there between his arrival to that city and an ending that features the Statue of Liberty on the background is the known and painful story of a man who struggled against his past while his eyes were staring at the future. Closer to an epic than to his typical realistic style, the Kazan who made America America is a brutally honest one, for whom the faithful portrait of his conflicted feelings towards his own expatriate history buries any pretensions he could have had as a filmmaker. The fact that the film remained hidden for decades confirms Kazan’s independence, which the studios never knew how to properly handle without crumpling it.
Date and Times