Critics reviews

This dynamic work with the reality, that doesn’t want to transcend it but offers another angle to deal with memory, is the mirror or rather the diaphragm existing in between [Ray & Liz and No Home Movie].

Rather than attempt to compress, quicken, or create tension in its narrative with the tight cuts seen in popular cinema, No Home Movie accommodates these ambiguities in screening both memorable and mundane encounters between Chantal and her mother.

At once presumptuous and unpretentious, No Home Movie is an emotional, essentially private working-out of a second-generation Holocaust survivor's conflicted feelings or maybe what Freud would call a woman's pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother. Almost incidentally, it provides a prism through which to view the Brussels-born filmmaker's brilliant, erratic, essential oeuvre.

In the end, stasis and death prevail. Darkness becomes a veil and a shadow that, I find, wasn't (visually) as present in the films I had watched previously. No Home Movie is no home movie. It is Akerman's personal farewell; a farewell to her mother, to film, to the world. A striking last film whose images and conversations will stay with me for a long time.

A fitting last chapter of Akerman's career and life. A kind of sequel to her 1977 diaristic experiment News from Home, the film is a lucid meditation on intimacy and distance. Every lo-fi-video frame quivers with an escapable sense of grief and loss. My heart still aches.

With this final stroke of uniquely personal brilliance, the master filmmaker's final work also reminded the ever-burgeoning "hybrid nonfiction" landscape of artistic debts owed, and how vital and central her place is in the history of cinema.

Little can prepare a viewer for the rawness of No Home Movie, the last film by the extraordinary Chantal Akerman. Like the spindly tree lashed by desert winds in the film's first, unending shot, we are laid bare by this painfully intimate documentary about the final year of the filmmaker's mother's life.

Of course Akerman's movie about the illness and death of her mother, and her subsequent deeply felt absence, hit me hard in 2015, a few months after I lost my own mom. And then we lost Chantal Akerman.

The film opens with a lengthy stationary shot of a lone tree buffeted by strong winds. Sere barren fields stretch into the distance. An image of brute survival. The unthinking hearty life force. The cumulative effect of No Home Movie is devastating, even more so since Akerman is no longer with us.

These elegant images, delivered without context, could simply be shots that Akerman collected over time; strung together, they generate a meaning that bridges their vast geographic distance. They create a sense of ephemera, as well as a lulling beauty that is suddenly disrupted by the blocky, heavily processed streaming video of a Skype session.

The austere filmmaking contrasts with Natalia's direct emotionality, fashioning a portrait of loss that resonates as an illustration of our potentially futile efforts to understand our loved ones.

It concludes with the final and irrevocable absence of Maman, and is throughout intimately concerned with the movements of women within circumscribed domestic spaces. In other words, it shows Akerman's particular set of preoccupations and obsessions very much intact, but finds her adopting new modes and forms in order to explore them.