Slideshow
NEWS FROM HOME
8:30
Wednesday, July 19
Directed by Chantal Akerman
(1976) Akerman returns to the personal avant-garde essay to evoke a ghost town Manhattan, the news from home coming through “love letters” to the filmmaker in New York from her mother in Belgium. “When you see the images, you realize that New York has nothing to do with European ideas about it. The myth doesn’t connect at all with the reality of the city” (Akerman). DCP. Approx. 85 min.
Reviews
“A time capsule for a city that today resembles an alien planet.”
– Matt Prigge, Metro
“A GREAT CITY SYMPHONY.”
– J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books
“No portrait of New York captures both the majesty and the sorrow of the city quite like Chantal Akerman’s News From Home.”
– The Village Voice
“A considerable contribution to the hinterland area between narrative cinema and the avant-garde.”
– Time Out
“This is one of the best depictions of the alienation of exile that I know.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum
“A trance-like documentary... It gives a window into Akerman’s lifelong inherited anxiety, and the ways in which her work was a tribute to the woman who so cared for her, who sent her money to help support her young daughter, making art she probably didn’t understand. Her love for her mother is in everything she did.”
– Scout Tafoya, RogerEbert.com