After the incredible achievement of Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman returned to what might be understood as her cinematic birthplace: New York. After leaving Brussels, then Paris, Akerman landed in New York, seemingly on a whim. There she encountered cinematic iconoclasts, established relationships, and found a place where I finally managed to feel well.” In News from Home she balances a near-grandiose scale of discovery with the fragility of her connection to her other home in Brussels, from which her mother Natalia (“Nelly”) writes letters—loving, demanding, questioning, and only partially understanding. Chantal reads the letters in voiceover, sometimes drowned out by the city’s musique concrete of traffic and ambience. She speaks, always alone, and documents a myriad of time-specific sights and faces. Her mother’s place is central and sidelined; she is both always on her mind, and treated with pragmatic indifference. We never hear what Akerman writes back, unless one counts the film as a response.