Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, she reads 20 letters sent by her mother earlier, from the Time the 20 year old had first moved there from Brussels to become a filmmaker. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes shot in 16mm film together with camerawoman Babette Mangolte results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule. The film’s long takes (about fifty in total) add up not to a simple compendium of detached urban imagery but to a kind of autobiography.

Loan of the film print with kind support of the Austrian Filmmuseum.