Always in memory of Chantal Akerman

In a quiet Brussels apartment, a solitary widow meticulously maintains a life of routine. Her days are a relentless cycle of chores and errands, each moment a precise ritual. As the days pass, an imperceptible shift begins to unsettle her disciplined existence. Overcooked potatoes, forgotten lights, and small missteps hint at a growing turmoil beneath her composed exterior. With each passing day, the cracks in her orderly world widen.

The pulse of New York City reverberates through the lens, capturing its impersonal yet mesmerizing rhythm. Chantal Akerman’s life unfolds against this backdrop, while letters from her mother in Brussels, full of love yet tinged with manipulation, are read aloud by Akerman herself. As the city’s presence intensifies, the voice from home begins to wane, drawing a delicate tension between the life lived and the life left behind.

Anna, a detached and diffident director, arrives in Germany to show her latest film; she checks into a hotel, invites a stranger to her bed, and abruptly tells him to leave. He asks her to a birthday lunch with his mother and daughter; she goes. Afterward, in Cologne, she meets an old friend, a Polish Jew and war refugee. In Brussels, she spends the night at a hotel with her mother, whom she rarely sees. On the train, a stranger tells his story. Last, it's home to Paris, where her lover Daniel picks her up and they go to a hotel. Throughout, people make personal revelations to her, and Anna listens with little affect. Although it was 30 years ago, the war seems ever present.

A look at life in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Keeping the original theatrical mise-en-scene, the film features Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig reciting Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother directly to the audience as though we were the recipients of these private missives

Following over two dozen different people in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, Akerman examines acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance.

Cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton talks about herself and her musical path. She says she chose the cello because of the legato, and the possibility of a legato that could last forever. Then we are regaled with footage of the artist playing.

For more than a month, eating only powered sugar, a woman tries to deal with a breakup: she paints her room twice, removes the furniture, writes and rewrites a letter to her lover, clarifying all she had said. She spreads the pages on the floor. She lies down and waits. Finally, her sugar eaten, she is hungry and leaves. She flags down a truck; she and the trucker drive through the dark, stopping at a diner and bars. He asks for a hand job, she complies. He talks about his wife, children, and sex life. She arrives at the flat of her lover, a woman, who tells her she cannot stay. She says she is hungry, so her lover feeds her then allows her to stay the night. They make love.

Chantal Akerman films her mother, an old woman of Polish origin who is short lifetime, in her apartment in Brussels. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. Also, and to show how small the world has become, Chantal remains in contact with her mother at other times of the year via Skype from lands as far away from Belgium as Oklahoma or New York.

I DON'T BELONG ANYWHERE: THE CINEMA OF CHANTAL AKERMAN explores some of the Belgian filmmaker's 40 plus films, and from Brussels to Tel Aviv, from Paris to New York, it charts the sites of her peregrinations. An experimental filmmaker, a nomad, Chantal Akerman shared with Marianne Lambert her cinematic trajectory, one that never ceased to interrogate the meaning of her existence. And with her editor and long-time collaborator, Claire Atherton, she examines the origins of her film language, and aesthetic stance.

In the 70s and 80s, activist Carole Roussopoulos and actress Delphine Seyrig made use of new video technologies to fight for the women's movement. Archive material documents their interventions into the events of the time.