News from home

Chantal Akerman was born in the mid fifties, in a jewish protestant family. Both her

grandparents and her mother were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Only the

later, Natalia Akerman, survived. Akerman’s mother is a central figure in her film career,

and Chantal seems to capture the depths of her, both as a value and as a problematic

figure, from a feminist point of view. And with saying this, and enjoying a certain

transparency that only cinema can achieve, I also believe that Akerman’s cinema comes

from a certain sense of time and its melancholy and comes from certain places and their

own sense of time. It’s like a whole universe can emerge from the banal sadness of any

given sunday. A universe made from the “saudade” of every trashcan, alley, hallway and

wall. And although I haven’t seen her entire oeuvre, the films of her that I like the most are

“Jeanne Dielman” “Tu, Il, Elle” “Hotel Monterrey” “La Bas” and “News from Home”. “News

from Home”, particularly, is a film that has moved me deeply, maybe because I have

certain things in common wih it. The letters from her mother, which are read as a

background for images that show a New York very different from the capital of the arts that

some snobs want to see in the city. This is a New York not of tourism, but of trash bags

floating in deserted alleys, and nocturnal figures coming in and out of the subway and in the streets.