From the East (D'Est)

In From the East, Akerman demonstrates her anti-ethnographic model of filmmaking. And this may be the film’s most obvious achievement: it is a journey through various places – explicitly titled From the East – but it never feels exploitative or condescending toward its…

Zach A

Akerman, the great drifting spirit of cinema, roams through cramped living rooms and open fields, half-empty dance halls and one seemingly infinite train station, and discovers something eternal in the ephemeral. Unlike the stoic New Yorkers of News From Home, the Europeans…

Jacob

If anything best describes what I love most about the films of Chantal Akerman, you could just watch a documentary like From the East and let those images continuously sweep you in as it goes on. It feels so oddly serene, for the fact that everything we're seeing in here is…

Jaime Rebanal 🇵🇸

I am drifting gliding across planes watching waiting to be noticed and seen again everyone looks away and I disappear into the numbness of cold nights and flickering lights

Willow Maclay

One of those magical films where nothing happens, but EVERYTHING happens.

Cian Mulligan

Seemingly existing in a space without narrative or comment (no constructed dialogue, nothing staged), D’est is in itself a contradiction. It’s impossible for a text to exist without narrative. By rule, some footage would be left out of the finished product, Akerman would…

Lee Does Not Exist सब्बे सत्ता सुखी होन्तु

Le cinéma d'Akerman convient parfaitement au moment présent, mais en même temps c'est douloureux parce que 1) je me sens jamais aussi seul que devant un de ses films et 2) parce qu'elle capte le monde à distance, mais avec un tel désir envers lui (d'où la solitude, même…

SylvainL

broke my heart, we've lost sight of the cinema's raison d'être. it's all noise now, and the people who cared are disappearing.

isabelle

surrender to understanding a narrative within the slowness for yourself

dselwyns