Chantal Akerman - While addressing universal experiences–the pain found woven into love, the end of relationships, difficult family histories, self-doubt, the end of life–Akerman‘s sharp eye toward memory raises questions about what it means to love and care for oneself and for another

Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs, Trans. by Corina Copp, The Song Cave, 2019.

And there were other girls who were odd ones too and that was how it was. We loved each other and that was that. I was 18 in May 1968 and it seemed as though my style was becoming popular and that everything was going back to normal if I dare use the word because I really don’t like the word normal. I prefer the word abnormal but only just, because in the word abnormal you can still hear the word normal and that’s a word I really don't want to hear.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

In this unforgettable and moving memoir, the last book written before her death, the legendary film director Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) blends her matter-of-fact writing style with family photographs and stills from her own films in order to better describe and speak toward the most tender of human elements: her family, her lovers, and, most urgently, the deterioration of her mother’s health along with her own mental health.

While addressing universal experiences–the pain found woven into love, the end of relationships, difficult family histories, self-doubt, the end of life–Akerman‘s sharp eye toward memory raises questions about what it means to love and care for oneself and for another, and in the end, what the personal cost of those decisions can be.

"With pride because I finally believed in my ability to say something that I’d had trouble saying. I told myself, I am strong for once, I speak. I tell the truth."

The Belgian director Chantal Akerman passed away in 2015, leaving behind a cinematographic work of note but also a number of prose works. Hypersensitive, life was too short to heal her wounds and to describe the human condition through the suffering they caused. Ma mère rit (My Mother Laughs), the artist's last written work, is another eloquent example of this. It’s a deeply moving autobiographical text of rare and raw intensity.

https://www.bozar.be/en/activities/129896-ma-mere-rit

My Mother Laughs (Ma mere rit) is a performative reading of Chantal Akerman’s prose, written during her mother’s illness, shortly before her death. Similarities echo in No Home Movie which Akerman filmed in the final months of her mother’s life. My Mother Laughs is presented as an intimate portrayal of the time spent between Chantal and her mother, Nelly.  Grace Carter, Paige McKinney and Ron Mason Gassaway interpret Chantal’s disarmingly direct words in the spirit of her relationship to her mother, her self, her films and how her mother and her own life were intricately entwined and over-shadowed by the Holocaust (Nelly was a survivor of Auschwitz). Grace Carter, as performer, reads as a conduit for Chantal’s “voice,” honoring her boldness, her rawness, her quietude, her wry observations and her deep well of reverence for her mother.
This performance is conceived and acted by Grace Carter with co-director Paige McKinney and sound by Ron Mason Gassaway. Portland-based Carter, McKinney and Gassaway previously worked together to produce The Yellow Wallpaper at CoHo Theater in 2016.

https://nwfilm.org/films/chantal-akerman-my-mother-laughs-ma-mere-rit/

1. Chantal Akerman’s last film, No Home Movie, was clearly something more than a movie for her—and since she took her own life less than two months after completing it and only days before its first public screening at the New York Film Festival, it is now something more than a movie for us.
Most simply described, the film is a portrait of the artist’s octogenarian mother Natalia (Nelly) Akerman or, more precisely, a portrait of the artist’s relationship with her mother. Akerman’s raw, nearly two-hour digital video assemblage conveys loss, displacement, and ambivalence in its very title. Is it to be read as the assertive “No Home-Movie” or the plaintive “No-Home Movie”?
At once presumptuous and unpretentious, No Home Movie is an emotional, essentially private working-out of a second-generation Holocaust survivor’s conflicted feelings or maybe what Freud would call a woman’s pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother. Almost incidentally, it provides a prism through which to view the Brussels-born filmmaker’s brilliant, erratic, essential oeuvre. - J. Hoberman
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Chantal Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and professor. She is best known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was dubbed a "masterpiece" by the New York Times. During her 42 years of active filmmaking, Akerman's influence on queer, feminist, and avant-garde cinema remains unmatched, her films highlighting a near physical passage of time.
Akerman's films have been shown at the Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, among many others.