No Home Movie
| No Home Movie | |
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Film poster
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| Directed by | Chantal Akerman |
| Produced by | Chantal Akerman Patrick Quinet Serge Zeitoun |
| Written by | Chantal Akerman |
| Starring | Chantal Akerman Natalia Akerman |
| Cinematography | Chantal Akerman |
| Edited by | Claire Atherton |
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Production
company |
Liaison Cinématographique
Paradise Films |
| Distributed by | Zeugma Films (France) |
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Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
| Country | France Belgium |
| Language | French English |
No Home Movie is a French-Belgian 2015 documentary film directed by Chantal Akerman, focusing on conversations between the film-maker and her mother just months before her mother's death. Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival on 10 August 2015, it is Akerman's last film.
The documentary consists of "conversations—whether in person in a neat kitchen, or over Skype from abroad—" between Akerman and her mother Natalia, who was a survivor of Auschwitz. Halfway through the film, Akerman cuts to a succession of traveling shots of a desert, which "cleave(s) the movie in two."
Filming ran several months. Her mother died shortly after filming ended, at the age of 86, in April 2014. Akerman whittled down around forty hours' worth of footage to 115 minutes; she used small handheld cameras and her BlackBerry to film. "I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it," Akerman in an interview with The New York Times. Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris. Le Monde reported that she committed suicide.
The film premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival on 7 October 2015, where it was described as "an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." One scene, in particular, where the two "sit at the kitchen table, eating potatoes that Ms. Akerman has prepared, telling her mother that even she, the peripatetic artist, has mastered a few domestic skills" highlights, as one New York Times reviewer suggests, "the moment as a reference to a memorable potato-peeling scene" from Jeanne.
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