Week 8/2024

This week’s selection takes us to the 1970s. Cinema Lumière in Antwerp is screening Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1978) on Tuesday. A formal meditation on distance and kinship, the familiarity of home rendered foreign through the displacement of the ways in which home is usually experienced through the senses. The quotidian of the mother survives in the prosody of the daughter’s reading. She’s not answering the letters, but the repeated recital of a mother’s life in Brussels and the montage of images and sounds of her own day to day in New York create an aesthetic space, a distance, a rhythm in which these displaced, muted affects can be shared.

Lina Wertmüller’s Fatto di sangue [Blood Feud] (1978) is being screened at CINEMATEK in Brussels on Thursday. Sicily, just as the fascists take power. Two men fall in love with the widow of a murdered sailor. The political turmoil in their country ultimately takes all three on a journey across the ocean to New York. Wertmüller’s take on popular cinema was heavily critiqued as she struggled to dissociate her successes in Hollywood with her identity as a woman.

On Friday, Beursschouwburg in Brussels is screening De quelques évènements sans signification (1979) by Mostafa Derkaoui. “Around the port’s streets and popular bars of Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conduct discussions with people about their expectations of, and aspirations for, the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, they begin to probe the context and motives of the killing. At the heart of [the film] is an interrogation on the role of cinema in society, documentary and the Real, and what constitutes an urgency for a national cinema that is being born.” (Afrika in Motion Film Festival)