A century in brine, then a rude awakening in modern Brooklyn. An American Pickle, directed by Brandon Trost and released in 2020, is a comedy about an immigrant labourer who misses a hundred years of history and has to make sense of the one relative he has left.
What is An American Pickle about?
The setup is simple and absurd in equal measure. An immigrant working the floor of a pickle factory falls into a vat and is sealed in, and the brine does something no doctor can explain: it keeps him exactly as he was. One hundred years later the seal breaks and he climbs out into a Brooklyn he does not recognise, with its glass towers, smartphones and a vocabulary that means nothing to him. The search for family leads to a single survivor, his great-grandson, who writes computer code for a living and has little in common with a man whose worldview was fixed in a village a century earlier. The two share blood and almost nothing else. Their attempts to live together, understand each other and avoid driving one another away form the spine of the story, and the comedy comes as much from the great-grandson's modern anxieties as from the newcomer's bewilderment.
About the cast
Seth Rogen heads the cast, with Sarah Snook, Molly Evensen, Eliot Glazer, Kalen Allen, Kevin O'Rourke, Sean Whalen and Geoffrey Cantor rounding out the ensemble. The supporting players fill out the Brooklyn the old-timer stumbles into.
Context & significance
Brandon Trost directs this American comedy, which runs 88 minutes and is listed in the catalogue under a single genre tag. The fish-out-of-water setup has a long history in comedy, and here the water is time itself: the gap between an early twentieth-century immigrant and a present-day coder gives the film room to poke at both eras. It is also, underneath the jokes, a story about immigration and what gets passed down or lost across generations, which is why the family reunion carries weight as well as laughs.
Watching An American Pickle on Ktime
An American Pickle streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so the jokes land whichever way you prefer to watch. A free K-Time account is all you need to log in and press play. The Farsi interface is built for Iranians living outside Iran, with browsing and playback designed around Persian from the ground up.