No Home Movie

"An intimate self-reflection... a tender, haunting film" Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times

One of cinema's most innovative figures, Chantal Akerman passed away in tragic circumstances in 2015. Her last film, No Home Movie is not only a fitting coda to her career but also her most intimate and personal work: a record of her relationship with her mother over the course of the latter's last year of life. Through webcam chats, conversations at the kitchen table and shots of lonely landscapes, Akerman constructs a touching, melancholy portrait of her mother, a Holocaust survivor, and also of her own impending grief. In documenting some of their last conversations, No Home Movie is above all a film about love – specifically, the love shared by two women, unbound by physical distance and mortality.

No Home Movie, dir. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France 2015, 113 mins

The following screenings of No Home Movie are accompanied by special Q&As and introductions:

Friday 24 June, 8.15pm - Claire Atherton, editor of No Home Movie and longterm collaborator with Chantal Akerman introduces the film and joins us for a Q&A following the screening.

Saturday 25 June, 8.55pm - Ben Gibson introduces the screening. Gibson, recently appointed Director of the DFFB Berlin (Berlin Film School), was a friend and colleague of Chantal Akerman since working with her as a distributor in the 1980s.

Sunday 26 June, 6.20pm - Ruth Novaczek introduces the screening. Novaczek is an artist and filmmaker whose work is shown nationally and internationally. She has written essays on Chantal Akerman, and smoked cigarettes and shared jokes with her outside a number of venues in London.

Tuesday 28 June, 8.40pm - Queer feminist curating collective Club des Femmes present short film La Ducha (The Shower), to be screened alongside No Home Movie. This is introduced by Selina Robertson.

Winner of the DAAD short film prize at the 2011 Berlinale, La Ducha follows a lesbian couple as they spend their last morning together in their bathroom; they smoke, they shower, they talk and then one of them leaves. The film encapsulates Akerman’s signature minimalism and her life-long concern with the representation of the queered female body and the politics of space.

La Ducha, dir. Maria Jose San Martin, Chile 2010, 10 mins. Spanish with English subtitles.

Wednesday 29 June, 8.30pm - feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who has written extensively on Akerman's work, introduces the film. She writes:

"I am very pleased to have been invited to introduce Chantal Akerman’s last film No Home Movie. I first met Chantal Akerman at the Festival of Independent Avant-grarde Film held at the National Film Theatre in September 1973. I was very impressed by Hotel Monterey (1972), which was screened at the festival alongside films by other women directors that I had not previously come across, for instance, Yvonne Rainer and Joyce Wieland; I felt the first intimations of a future feminist avant-garde, with its own specific aesthetic and concerns. But I was quite unprepared for the shock of seeing, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 2080 Bruxelles, which has remained, ever since, a definitive film for me, one that I have seen many times and from which I continue to learn. There are resonances across the decades between this film and Akerman’s later work; inevitably, the resonances still reverberate in 2015 in No Home Movie."