The Cinematheque

“An extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty … As much a masterpiece as Jeanne Dielman.”

NYFF 2015

The farewell film of Chantal Akerman is a portrait of the director’s mother in the final months of her life. Natalia (“Nelly”) Akerman was a Polish refugee and Auschwitz survivor who settled in Brussels. No Home Movie, as emotionally affecting as it is uncompromisingly formalist, is shot largely within the confines of Nelly’s apartment, where conversations between mother and daughter are interspersed with scenes (à la Jeanne Dielman, Akerman’s magnum opus) of Nelly’s everyday routine. Exploring displacement, solitude, maternal love, and mortality, Akerman also attempts, before the opportunity is lost forever, to learn more about her mother’s personal experiences in the Holocaust, events which have haunted the lives of both women but which Nelly has never wanted to discuss. ​“The only subject of my films is my mother,” Akerman observed in 2011. No Home Movie offers the coda.

In French with English subtitles

One of the Best Films of the Decade (#5)
Film Comment

“Akerman’s final movie is her most intimate, and her most expressive.”

Amy Taubin, “Best of 2015” (#1), Artforum

“A conceptual and emotional counterpoint to her early masterwork Jeanne Dielman … No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.”

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times