Acts: A Screenplay

by Hal Hartley

After years of terrorizing the politically difficult sect of Jews called Christians, Paul, a devout Jew and prosperous businessman, decides that a disgraced young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth (whom he never met), was on to something important for the future of the Hebrew religion. He spends the next couple of decades trying to make both his fellow Jews and his gentile neighbors see things his way and meets with unending resistance.

Acts is a modernist retelling of the adventures of Saint Paul as told in The
Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the Christian New Testament, but in perfectly contemporary terms: characters smoke cigarettes, drink cold beer from metal cans, and drive cars—and it makes no apology for pretending to be happening in the first century in Palestine and the Aegean.

This volume also includes the screenplay for Hartley’s critically acclaimed short feature, The Book of Life (1998) and his one play, Soon (1997), commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and staged in Europe and the United States in 1998 and 2001. These previous works, instigated by contemporary events involving millennialist Christian conflicts with American law, proved to be the stimulus for Hartley’s decade-long study of Saint Paul and the writing of Acts (2008).

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2022

About the author

Hal Hartley is the writer, director and producer of numerous feature films. He received the best screenplay award at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1998 for Henry Fool as well as prizes at Sundance (Trust), Tokyo (Amateur), Prague (Meanwhile) and Berlin (Ned Rifle). He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France and an alumnus of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City.