Cities | Chantal Akerman - News from Home (16mm print)

News from Home - 16mm print
Dir. Chantal Akerman; introduction by Ainslie Roddick (CCA Curator)

CCA is delighted to open the Cities discussion with a 16mm print screening of Chantal Akerman’s 1977 film News From Home. The city itself is the central character in Akerman’s personal and intimate dialogue between the filmmaker and her mother. Long, stationary camera shots of New York City at street level are interspersed with the sound of Akerman’s voice, reading letters written by her mother back home in Brussels. The letters are variously funny, anxious and intimate, asking after Akerman’s wellbeing since moving to the city as a young women in 1975. Never hearing Akerman’s response, we are left to contemplate the sound and the movement of the city in its various states: its cracked pavements, dilapidated shops and shining buildings, characterful cars, evening ramblers and subway travellers. It muses over a sense of place, isolation and urban alienation at a time of civic transformation, but also during a pertinent personal moment in Akerman’s life.

Supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and with thanks to Cinematek, Royal Film Archive of Belgium.