Close Up

5 February 2017: Take Two: But Elsewhere Is Always Better / No Home Movie

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Close-Up is proud to present a screening of Vivian Ostrovsky’s portrait of Chantal Akerman, paired with the groundbreaking auteur’s final film No Home Movie. Ostrovsky will attend the screening and introduce the programme.

But Elsewhere Is Always Better
Vivian Ostrovsky
2006 | 5 min | B/W & Colour | DCP

A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal's personality. Forty years of friendship condensed into four minutes...

No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman
2016 | 115 min | Colour | DCP
Introduced by Vivian Ostrovsky

The final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor and familiar presence in many of her daughter's films.
 
"At the center of Chantal Akerman's enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother's life and their own intense connection to each other. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." — New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center