News from Home

Name: News from Home
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1977-05-20
Duration: 89 min
Rating: 4.5
Cast: Chantal Akerman

Rating

4.5 (1)

Release Date

5/20/1977

Runtime

89 mins

Genres

Documentary

Overview

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman lives in New York. Filmed images of the City accompany texts of Akerman's loving mother back home in Brussels. The City comes more and more to the front while the words of the mother, read by Akerman herself, gradually fade away.

Status

Released

Original Language

French

Budget

Revenue

Homepage

How It Feels

Read from this film's synopsis, keywords and credits, and used to work out what it sits beside.

A quietly hypnotic meditation on distance and displacement: New York's streets and interiors play against the intimate words of a faraway mother, creating a tender ache about the space between homesickness and belonging.

Mood

MelancholicContemplativeWistful

Themes

IsolationFamilyMemoryMigration

Tone

Tender

Pacing

Meditative

Look

Documentary-likeNaturalisticLong takes

Structure

Framed flashback

Chantal Akerman

Narrator (voice)

Reviews

nicolascagegoons

Aug 27, 2026

like hotel monterey, akkerman uses space, people and enviroments to create a story thats not entirely visible.
why do we place so much value on the big cities?
because a lot of big companies, stores and large amounts of people live there? like that one scene from the shawshank redemption where the prison guards figure out how andy escapes, when ripping that poster off the wall, the big gaping hole of isolations cease to creep in.
the film also sees akkerman read the letters send to her by her mother.
the film uses that social isolation to also qeustion the faith of our connection to our parents and if we really want to connect with them at all. im in a place rn where i really just wanna get out of the house, away from my family as they don't value full commitment or rather not giving full commitment to my social or medical transition.
and for many others there are different reasons.
(Watch my feature film https://boxd.it/cQ1mBp )