There are movies, there are documentaries, and then there are visual meditations -- films that don't tell a story, exactly, but that through images and words make you think and ponder them as well as wonder how they relate to your life.
Such is the case with News from Home.
In 1976, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman came back to NYC after having lived here for a couple of years in the early 1970s. She wanted to document the city that had played an important part in her development as a director. Ackerman shot huge amounts of footage of Manhattan street scenes, starting in Tribeca, working upwards to Midtown, and then uptown and towards the Bronx. Eventually it ends on the Staten Island Ferry, pulling away from the mighty isle, the great buildings looming and moving away (including, of course, the World Trade Centers). The city moving away from her is clearly metaphoric.
Most of the scenes are of people walking and cars rushing by on busy streets, at all hours of the day and night, with numerous forays into the subway. It is pure 1970s NYC, presented totally unfiltered and without sentimentality.
During the film, there are occasional voiceovers, done by Ackerman herself, reading from letters her mother sent to her while she was living in NYC a few years earlier -- the "news from home." The letters are about the mundane life her family is living back in Belgium and asking how she is enjoying life in the city. There are no shocking revelations from the letter, nothing dramatic. The film and letters are simply about how life passes by, both literally in the streets of the city and figuratively in the lives of people. Its simplicity is what makes News From Home so powerful.
Chantal Ackerman was a fascinating and pioneering director who sadly died in 2015. Read more about her and her incredible work here and watch News From Home below.
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