News from Home presents a series of abstract and fragmentary images of everyday urban life in 1970s New York City, accompanied by the distinctive narration of filmmaker Chantal Akerman as she dispassionately reads through her mother’s alternately affectionate, melancholic, and sincere, but maternally manipulative letters from her native Belgium. The film opens to the surreal […]
In the unnerving silence of a sparsely furnished kitchen in Brussels, a poised, anonymous middle-aged woman (Delphine Seyrig) – identified only through the title of the film as Jeanne Dielman – completes her food preparation, places the contents into a large cooking pot on the stove, reaches for a match, lights the burner, and with […]
Je, tu, il, elle opens to the terse and contextually ambiguous, yet personally revealing statement “…And I left” as a nameless young woman – later identified as Julie (Chantal Akerman) – sits on a chair off-side of the frame with her back to the camera as she recounts an autobiographical anecdote into an obscured journal. […]
Something of a muted hybrid between a thirty-something version of the existential crossroads between the freedom of academic emancipation and the responsibilities of adulthood captured by Jae-eun Jeong in Take Care of My Cat crossed with Alain Tanner’s perceptive portrait of the May 68 generation in the aftermath of the failed cultural revolution in Jonah […]
Ostensibly titled after highly reactive (and consequently, short-lived) molecules that contain unpaired electrons in their outer shells, Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals presents a series of fractured (and often sexually gratuitous) tales of coincidence and synchronicity. The film unfolds in an organic structure that reflects the conventional proverb on the consequential, unforeseen, long-reaching effects of the […]
The advent of the Balkan Wars following the collapse of the Soviet Union (and leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia) – and in particular, the engagement of NATO peacekeeping forces in Kosovo – forms the destabilized, uncertain backdrop for Barbara Albert’s politically loaded Nordrand, a zeitgeist film on the changing face of Austrian society at […]