Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie
(2015) Belgium, 1hr 55mins, French, English subtitles, cert PG
£5 (£3) | Booking advised

With a reading from Akerman’s My Mother Laughs (Silver Press, 2019)

No Home Movie, Akerman’s final film, is a poignant documentary study of her elderly mother, Nelly Akerman, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland. The film features conversations between them, in person or over Skype, often concerning her mother’s declining health and her wartime experiences, with long static shots of her mother pottering from room to room in her Brussels apartment. In My Mother Laughs, a literary counterpart to the film (first published in 2013), Akerman writes about her mother and of her deteriorating physical state, but also of her own life and apprehension for a future without her mother’s presence. Written in the Brussels apartment, this ‘interior notebook’ shares deeply personal thoughts with uncompromising honesty. In different ways, through both word and image, Akerman presents us with a story of loss and a version of the ‘simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.’

To introduce the film, JoAnne McKay will read excerpts from My Mother Laughs, and include poems written about her own mother.

JoAnne McKay has lived in Dumfriesshire for the past two decades and her work has been widely published and anthologised, most recently in ‘If you find my mother buy her flowers’ (The Poets’ Republic Press, 2019). Her most recent project, ‘We Fire the Dark’, was a series of readings at CAMPLE LINE exploring the collection of Dr Grierson’s museum in Thornhill.

You can book with us directly | info@campleline.org.uk | 01848 331 000 | or via Eventbrite