Product Review

Chantal Akerman was a filmmaker whose works are exercises in pure independence, creativity and art. Each Akerman film is a world to be explored on its own terms, and her viewers must give themselves over completely to the experience of the film and watch with an open mind. Strong themes in her films include women at work and in the home, and their relationships to men, each other, children, food, love, sex, art and storytelling. Akerman insisted convincingly that her films' modes of address rather than their stories alone are the locus of their feminist perspective (Janet Bergstrom, Sight & Sound). She forever changed the history of cinema. From the East - Akerman retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. South - The heart of this journey is the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr in Jasper, Texas. But this is not an anatomy of his murder, rather, it is an evocation of how this event fits in to a landscape and climate as much mental as physical. From the Other Side - With technology developed for the military, the INS has stemmed the flow of illegal immigration in San Diego. But for the desperate, there are still the dangerous deserts of Arizona, where Akerman shifts her focus. Down There Akerman spends a brief period on her own in an apartment by the sea in Tel Aviv. She takes the chamber play to its ultimate form: it is almost entirely chamber. She films from the apartment and her narration talks about her family, Jewish identity and childhood. She wonders whether normal everyday life is possible in this place. And bonus film: Chantal Akerman, From Here (directed by Gustavo Beck & Leonardo Luiz Ferreira) - An hour-long, single-shot conversation with the filmmaker about her films and her directorial philosophy.