Over the last several years, Jan Schütte has become a regular at such festivals as Toronto and San Sebastian for his sympathetic and moving filmed portraits of immigrants and émigrés looking to work, to love and to adjust to their displaced status. He made his international reputation with his first feature film, 1987's Dragon's Chow (Drachenfutter). Born in Mannheim, Germany, Schütte himself lives a transnational existence, shooting films not only in Germany but also in Poland, the Netherlands and the US. Schütte began his career first as a photographer and then as a documentary filmmaker, and his fiction films retain his careful eye for realism and observed behavior. As a traveler living in New York, Schütte began reading Bashevis Singer for his portraits of immigrant communities in the city, eventually adapting some of his stories for the feature Love Comes Lately, which earned him his first berth at the Sundance film festival. The film will be released theatrically this summer.

In this adaptation of three Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories, Bashevis Singer's alter ego Max Kohn, an Austrian émigré living in New York, is played by famed Austrian actor Otto Tausig. Max is a writer given to constructing stories about his own alter egos, characters who live exciting lives despite their advancing ages. Otto's life itself has a certain excitement, given his various romantic attachments, in this wistful antidote to commercial cinema's youth obsession. Schütte was especially taken with Bashevis Singer's stories describing the experience of love among the elderly. Inspired, Schütte adapted one story into a short film entitled Old Love (2001), which screened at the HFA in 2006 and became the basis for Love Comes Lately.