No Home Movie

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.” These are the words Chantal Akerman uses to describe her last movie, her swan song that premiered shortly before her suicide, in October 2015: a touching portrait of her mother, Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor, who suffered from chronic anxiety and rarely ever left her apartment, avoiding conversations that would bring her face to face with her painful past. Just like in her masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” in 1975, the director documents the daily routine of an almost invisible woman with a confessional attitude that feel incredibly intimate, paying a last tribute to the person who influenced her oeuvre like no other, dissecting their relationship in a world that’s changing at lightning speed. A rare case of a film so deeply personal and at the same time so universal.