The Cinematheque

“One of the best depictions of the alienation of exile that I know.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

After the incredible achievement of Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman returned to what might be understood as her cinematic birthplace: New York. After leaving Brussels, then Paris, Akerman landed in New York, seemingly on a whim. There she encountered cinematic iconoclasts, established relationships, and found a place ​“where I finally managed to feel well.” In News from Home she balances a near-grandiose scale of discovery with the fragility of her connection to her other home in Brussels, from which her mother Natalia (“Nelly”) writes letters—loving, demanding, questioning, and only partially understanding. Chantal reads the letters in voiceover, sometimes drowned out by the city’s musique concrete of traffic and ambience. She speaks, always alone, and documents a myriad of time-specific sights and faces. Her mother’s place is central and sidelined; she is both always on her mind, and treated with pragmatic indifference. We never hear what Akerman writes back, unless one counts the film as a response.

In English

“A serene and monumental time capsule … What might otherwise have been a mere aestheticized travelogue becomes a work of aching psychological sleight of hand: like Akerman, the viewer observes the workaday tumult of New York and thinks of Brussels, watches the strolling strangers and imagines her mother.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A haunting, beautiful, brilliantly layered depiction of filial affection and late-’70s Manhattan.”

Jenni Olson, MUBI Notebook