MFAH Film Houston Premieres: No Home Movie

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents another in its Houston Premieres series. Enjoy these critically acclaimed, award-winning international films as they make their Houston debut!

No Home Movie

Directed by Chantal Akerman
2015, in French with English subtitles
Belgium
115 minutes
DCP

The suicide of revered artist and filmmaker Chantal Akerman last October stunned and saddened the global film community. It makes watching her final film all the more poignant, as No Home Movie reveals the tender intimacy of her relationship with her mother Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014.

The film unfolds as a series of landscapes, cityscapes, and conversations: sometimes together in her mother’s Brussels apartment, on other occasions long-distance, conducted by Skype when Chantal is abroad.

Akerman’s experimental style favors long takes, shot with a stationary camera, allowing the viewer to share her reflective space.

An influential feminist, Akerman came to prominence at age 25 with 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and went on to make over 40 features, shorts, and documentaries, as well as installations exhibited at many prestigious museums.

“Chantal’s films do not comfort. They jolt and they re-orient, they put you and me face to face with accumulating time, in whose shadow we live whether we know it or not. That’s the source of their terror and their great beauty—one in the same.” – Film historian and critic Kent Jones