News from Home

In the 1970s and early 1980s, no genre captured the spirit and desires of cinephile audiences as accurately as road movies. The motto was: drive, drive, drive! And in most cases, that meant across America. In Chantal Akerman's work, alongside the intoxication and elegance of cinematic driving, the fractures in this transatlantic desire are also palpable. Although she shoots ‘over there,’ immersing herself in the city of New York as she drives, she does so from a distance, in images full of loneliness and strangeness. On the soundtrack, above the sharp background noise of the city, the filmmaker reads ‘news from home’: letters from her mother in Brussels. In the dazzling contrast between the home conveyed in this way and the visible foreignness, the utopian road of cinema becomes a dialectical detour. (A.H.)

Introduction by Lotte Schreiber and Borjana Ventzislavova