1976

News from Home

Belgium-France, 1976 / 16mm / Color / 90 min
Chantal Akerman


“J’adore. Toujours pas libre de ma mère.”

News from Home

Belgium-France, 1976 / 16mm / Color / 90 min

Cast: Chantal Akerman

Production: Marilyn Watelet , Alain Dahan

Sound: Dominique Dalmasso

Editing: Francine Sandberg

Photography: Babette Mangolte, Luc Benhamou

« love letters » to the filmmaker in New York from her mother in Europe…

synopsis

A mother writes to her daughter who has left for America…
A small voice from a Europe that is still trying to be heard…
Letters from a mother, simple letters, love letters…
A small voice from a Europe that is still trying to be heard…

A distant voice that we would like to hear close by…
Little music of life that we still hear but to which we can no longer answer from New York.

New York, the most completed city opens up in front of us
New York, bearer of hope, our future already in the past, closes itself in front of us.
And the letters received from the lost New York sound like the Dead Sea scrolls of a future Atlantis.


News from home comes through as « love letters » to the filmmaker in New York from her mother in Europe. This text paints an intimate picture of family life, with its catalogue of minor illnesses, domestic routines, betrothals and financial anxieties. The elegiac emotionalism of the text is counterpointed not only by the flat monotone of Akerman’s recitation but also by the images of Manhattan as an alien, urban ghost-town, its streets preternaturally empty.