NO HOME MOVIE World Cinema

Though not a “home movie” in the conventional sense, the late Chantal Akerman’s sweet, melancholic ode to her mother is a movie about home and the wild places beyond it. The filmmaker’s mother, Natalia, who died in 2014, was an Auschwitz survivor. In NO HOME MOVIE we see Natalia puttering around her Brussels apartment. Occasionally we see her face filling a laptop screen while in Skype conversation with her daughter. In contrast to Natalia, Chantal lives a nomadic life, visiting all number of far-flung locales (shown in unbroken, hypnotic shots of blustering, barren landscapes) — one woman who is homebound, another who is a wanderer, brought together through technology, conversation and the affection that grows ever more deep between a parent and child when one is nearing life’s end. The patient viewer will be only too happy to fall into the meditative, moving rhythms of NO HOME MOVIE. — Beth Hanna