• 9030 Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:15:00 @ Kino 2

Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Alain Dahan,Marilyn Watelet
Cinematographer: Babette Mangolte
Editor: Francine Sandberg

A poetic time capsule of late-70s Manhattan, Akerman’s minimalist film juxtaposes intimate missives from her mother with scenes from her temporary location.

“I dream about you and hope you’re happy.” “I know sunny weather depresses you.” “Write soon – I’m anxious to hear about your work, New York, everything.” After returning to Europe for a couple of productive years in which she made Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman, Akerman found her way back to New York, the city that had so influenced her work and where she had first established a connection to an avant-garde approach to cinema. Here, in English, Akerman narrates over a series of magnetic but aloof shots of the city, reading from letters written by her Belgian-based mother Natalia that the director had received when previously living in New York, during the period in which she made her breakthrough 1972 films Hotel Monterey and La chambre.

In this affecting documentary – partly shot by cinematographer and frequent collaborator Babette Mangolte on 16mm over the summer of 1976, and going on to screen at the Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam and London film festivals – the camera acts as a distant observer of the city, slowly panning along desolate, down-at-heel streets and shabby subway cars before eventually coasting out onto the Hudson River. As conveyed through the increasingly inquisitive letters from Akerman’s beloved mother, who was later immortalised in 2015’s No Home Movie, News From Home is a meditation on a sense of dislocation, a theme that would continue to present itself through the director’s body of work.

“One of the best depictions of the alienation of exile.” – Chicago Reader

2K Restoration. Restored in 2013 by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK).