“Bye bye America” is the tale of an uncommon journey. Isaac, his friend Moshe and Genovefa, Moshe´s wife, leave New York for Poland by boat. They end up in Germany, celebrate Christmas in Berlin and finally reach Poland after all. But everything has changed there. Isaac finds himself a wife and Genovefa an apartment. They all end up happy, at least for a while: one couple in Danzig and the other back home in Brighton Beach. Jan Schütte uses tenderness and economy and relate the tragi-comic odyssey of these three characters who are used to life´s upsets and yet find the spirit and strenght to continue their journey. Jan Schütte and Thomas Strittmatter tell how they got the inspiration for making “Bye bye America”: “While strolling along the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City, I met a few emigrants. They spoke a mixture of Yiddish, Polish and German, came from Galicia, Vienna or Hamburg. Their feelings are a mixture of curiosity, fear and sentimentality when they meet German... in that atmosphere that was both very European and totally Brooklynese, I found myself personally confronted with German history for the very first time.” The end of the Second War World saw the true beginning of the exile for those Jews who had managed to escape the extermination. They had no possibility of returning to their old country. There are countless stories and films on the Holocaust. However, it´s strange that virtually nobody has ever taken an interest in the lives of these emigrants after their exile and up to present day. The film is directly inspired by reality. “In Brighton Beach, we spoke with a lot of people and, using their stories and real experiences, along with their dreams, we managed to construct our story.” “I was fascinated”, Jan Schütte says, “by the unbelievable vitality of these men, by their wisdom which was at times tinged with a slightly brutish finesse. Some of them had roved the whole world to escape Nazism, traveling as far as Siberia or Shanghai, yet they all still had very strong feelings about their country. They felt both anxiety and nostalgia at the idea of returning to their home country.”