No Home Movie(CA Retro)

Chantal Akerman's final feature is mostly about the filmmaker eating, drinking, talking and arguing with her ailing mother at their apartment in Brussels. But No Home Movie isn't just merely a, well, "home movie": beyond her trademark structured, fixed-camera shots, we delve into the pair's interactions and feel for Akerman's painful loss of her own bearings, to a point that there's "no home" to go back to anymore - an exile embodied by the sporadic scenes of deserts and Akerman travelling alone in them. The film could be seen as Akerman's heart-breaking ode to her Holocaust-survivor mother - Natalia never lived to see the film, having passed away shortly after Akerman finished the shoot - but it's also the filmmaker laying bare her memories and weaknesses to audiences. For the very last time, sadly: Akerman committed suicide on October 5, 2015, two months after the film's premiere in Locarno. She was 65.