D'est (Experimental)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Marilyn Watelet,Helena Van Dantzig
Cinematographer: Rémon Fromont
Editor: Claire Atherton
An impressionistic visual survey of a fraying Eastern Europe, Akerman’s documentary traverses time and borders.
Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Akerman returned to Eastern Europe to film the people and the landscape that had, according to her editor Claire Atherton, “touched her”. Shooting on 16mm over several seasons without a final plan for what would become one of her most influential experimental documentaries, she filmed bleak winter landscapes, bustling streets, drab but welcoming apartments, and the faces of many people as they went about their days and nights, often caught in the act of waiting. Presented without narration, and taking in both urban and rural Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia, Akerman’s film allows a scene of post-Soviet-era uncertainty and upheaval to emerge.
Akerman would go on to adapt this meditative and rigorous film into her first multimedia work, D’EST, au bord de la fiction (FROM THE EAST: Bordering on Fiction) in 1995. The video installation, comprising 25 monitors playing scenes from the film on a loop, continues to be occasionally shown in gallery settings, most recently in 2024 at Jeu de Paume’s Chantal Akerman: Travelling retrospective in Paris.
“Applying her minimalist approach to the changing reality of Eastern Europe, avant-garde director Chantal Akerman's From the East is one of her most demanding ‘semi-fictional’ documentaries … a must-see for cinephiles concerned with the unique language of cinema.” – Variety
2K Restoration. Restored in 2022 by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK) and Fondation Chantal Akerman, under the supervision of the director of photography, Rémon Fromont, and with the collaboration of sound engineer Thomas Gauder.