NEWS FROM HOME with Claire Atherton | TIFF 2019

Editor and longtime Akerman collaborator Claire Atherton introduces Akerman’s brilliant, influential portrait of mid-’70s New York City, followed by a post-screening Q&A.
Epistolary essay, autobiographical elegy, and structural city symphony, News from Home has become one of Akerman's most influential films. Shot in long takes and elegant compositions by the great cinematographer Babette Mangolte (who introduced Akerman to the thriving independent cinema scene in New York while she was living there in the '70s), the film oscillates between travelling shots, pans, and static frames as it constructs a plaintive portrait of 1976 NYC, the metropolis' metros, façades, funky fashion, and sometimes eerily deserted streets juxtaposed with Akerman's soft, disaffected voiceover readings of letters she received from her doting and anxious mother, Nelly. News from Home includes many of Akerman's signature themes (isolation, identity, febrile family ties, architectural meditation, cultural and geographical displacement) and features some of the most searing and intimate passages in all her work: while we are not privy to Akerman's responses to her mother's letters, the sense of absence and maternal love linger in the images as quotidian experience, alienation, and observation take on near-devastating existential weight. Purposely dislocating sound from image, the film brilliantly coalesces intimacy with a grander sense of wonderment and curiosity.
Guest
Claire Atherton

[@GordonKegg-g8w]

The feeling in this film is something I recognise completely, spending time abroad gives you a sense of dislocation, you learn from it, however fleetingly!

[@gabrieljpaul]

Chantel Ackerman is so great 🖤🖤🖤

[@matejaraickovic7279]

Thank you for this!