Film Details

Topping some critics’ Ten Best lists for 2015, and appearing on many others, the final film by innovative Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is an uncompromising portrait of the person who was the most important figure in her life: her mother. Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, a Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor who died in Brussels in April 2014 at age 86 (65-year-old Chantal took her own life 16 months later), figured prominently in many of her daughter’s films, and partly inspired Chantal’s groundbreaking 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, about the daily routine of a Belgian housewife living in a small but tidy apartment. Nelly Akerman’s well-kept apartment is one of the stars of No Home Movie, and she is captured there (or should we say imprisoned there? preserved there?) for posterity in raw, grainy video footage shot by her rootless daughter. Chantal also engages her mom in conversation about her long life, but Nelly remains stubbornly reticent when it come to the Holocaust. “[A] formally demanding and impossibly intimate video essay.” –Variety.