No Home Movie

April 5, 2016 · The Pilot Light · 7:30 p.m.

The filmic companion to Chantal Akerman’s (1950-2015) recently published literary self-portrait My Mother Laughs, No Home Movie is a sober, profoundly moving portrait of Akerman’s mother in the months leading up to her death, when she was mostly confined to her Brussels apartment. A Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, Akerman’s mother suffered from chronic anxiety all her life, an affliction that fuelled much of her daughter’s creative output and helped shape Akerman’s thematic preoccupations with gender, sex, cultural identity, existential ennui, solitude, and mania.

Deceptively radical, No Home Movie gradually reveals the torrents of emotion beneath the seemingly quotidian exchanges between Akerman and her mother. Though the film is full of tenderness, violence and rupture are never far away as Akerman seeks to extract her mother’s harrowing story before that knowledge is forever irretrievable. In so doing, she creates an intense, demanding viewing experience, revealing in the most naked of ways the core of her work and her wounds: her focus on confinement, repetition, confrontation, dizzying instability, the longing to be elsewhere. — Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

About the Filmmaker

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was born in Brussels. An influential voice in experimental cinema, her many films include Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (’75),  Je, tu, il, elle (’77), Toute une nuit (’82), Histoire d’Amérique (’89), Night and Day (’91), From the East (’93), The Captive (’00), Tomorrow We Move (’04), and Almayer’s Folly (’11). No Home Movie (’15) is, presumably, Akerman’s final film.