“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.” (Chantal Akerman)

Shuttling between fiction, documentary and essay film, Chantal Akerman has created one of the most original, daring, and influential oeuvres in film history. No Home Movie is a sober, profoundly moving portrait of Akerman’s mother in the months leading up to her death, when she was mostly confined to her Brussels apartment. A Polish /Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz, Akerman’s mother suffered from chronic anxiety all her life, an affliction that fuelled much of her daughter’s creative output and helped shape Akerman’s thematic preoccupations with gender, sex, cultural identity, existential ennui, solitude, and mania.

“Deceptively radical, No Home Movie gradually reveals the torrents of emotion beneath the seemingly quotidian exchanges between Akerman and her mother. Though the film is full of tenderness, violence and rupture are never far away as Akerman seeks to extract her mother’s harrowing story before that knowledge is forever irretrievable. In so doing, she creates an intense, demanding viewing experience, revealing in the most naked of ways the core of her work and her wounds: her focus on confinement, repetition, confrontation, dizzying instability, the longing to be elsewhere. No Home Movie offers a treatise on space and time as Akerman’s mother lives out her final days in her orderly apartment, isolated from the outside world and far from a promised land that was never attained.” (Andréa Picard)