No Home Movie (Documentary)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Serge Zeïtoun,Chantal Akerman
Editor: Claire Atherton
Featured Subjects: Sylviane Akerman,Natalia Akerman,Chantal Akerman
An almost impossibly intimate portrait of her dying mother, Akerman’s final, melancholic film acknowledges their deep connection.
No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman’s last film, made a year before she died by suicide, is not only a fitting coda to her career but also her most personal work: a record of her relationship with her mother Natalia (Nelly) over the course of the latter’s last year of life. Through webcam chats, conversations at the kitchen table and shots of lonely landscapes, Akerman constructs a touching, melancholy portrait of her mother, as well as of her own impending grief.
Natalia, a Holocaust survivor afflicted with chronic anxiety, loomed large in her daughter’s body of work: from the fictionalised central figure of Jeanne Dielman (1975) to her more overt inclusion in News From Home (1976), as well as on the page in Akerman’s profoundly moving 2013 book My Mother Laughs. In documenting some of their last conversations, No Home Movie is, most of all, a film about love – specifically, the love shared by two women, unbound by physical distance and mortality.
“It is as if Chantal Akerman, perhaps for the first time in her career, has revealed the core of her work and her wounds in the most naked of ways.” – Cinema Scope