Leaving Home

Dear Chantal Akerman
Today I’m watching your film News From Home. It records the time when you left home, left behind the tired post-war landscape of Europe, the cruel history from which it was struggling to emerge and even though it all still followed you, set out, aged twenty, for the new world, America.

You finished News From Home almost half a century ago. Today I’m struck by how timeless it feels, how revelatory, important – its inscrutable calm gaze, nourishing. Because, here, today in this new century America dominates our screens once again.

It’s election day. On the TV a man is explaining how the election is too close to call, it’s 50/50 odds who’ll win. His eyes look slightly wild – so much depends on the result. This election feels like a choice between saving people from a burning building or pouring oil on the flames. The idea of post war feels now like luxury, something lost to the last century. All we seem to be able to do now is watch.

 

Leaving Home is a video essay made in response to Akerman's 1976 film News From Home for the BFI's Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume One [1967–1978].

Director: Sarah Wood. UK, 14 mins, 2025