No Home Movie

Chantal Akerman's last film premiered in competition at Locarno in August 2015. She died two months later. It is impossible now to watch it outside that fact, and it was already, before it, the most exposed thing she ever made — a film about her mother, who had been the implicit subject of her work since Jeanne Dielman forty years earlier.

Natalia Akerman lives in a Brussels flat. Her daughter films her at the kitchen table, in the corridor, asleep in a chair, and talks to her over Skype from hotel rooms abroad, the picture breaking into blocks. Natalia was deported from Poland as a girl and survived Auschwitz; her own parents did not. She says almost nothing about it, deflects, changes the subject to what her daughter has eaten. Akerman shoots on consumer cameras, holds shots of a tree bending in the wind in the Israeli desert, records the hum of the flat. The formal rigour of her early work is still there, applied now to a domestic space that is running out of time.

Some critics found the roughness of the images a lapse; most understood it as the point. The film sits at the end of a body of work about women in rooms, and it identifies, finally, the room and the woman all the others were about. It is very hard to watch and it is essential.