No Home Movie

Chantal Akerman's final film is both a tribute to a dying mother and the last testament of a director who would take her own life just months after the premiere, aged 65. Natalia Akerman had played a crucial role in her daughter's career, as she had written the letters that are read over the views of New York in the 1977 documentary News from Home, and had inspired the three-hour masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), whose iconic potato-peeling scene is recalled during one of the many conversations that make up this deeply personal profile. But there's nothing maudlin about Akerman's depiction of an octogenarian who had fled Poland and survived Auschwitz before raising Chantal and her sister Sylviane and becoming housebound in her Brussels flat. Contrasting with the cosy chats and Skype catch-ups (respectively filmed with an unobtrusive stillness and an artistic restlessness) are lengthy shots of the Israeli desert that emphasise Natalia's willingness to bend with the wind and Chantal's nomadic search for the ideas and images that would reinforce her identity as a feminist and a film-maker. Some will find them frustratingly introspective, but they encapsulate the themes that dominated Akerman's oeuvre and her sense of self as an individual and as a daughter.