My Mother Laughs Chantal Akerman 9780995716230

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels to Natalia and Jacob, Polish jews who had survived Auschwitz. She wanted to become a filmmaker after seeing Godard's Pierrot le Fou, and dropped out of film school after three months to make her first short film in 1968, Saute ma ville. She would go on to make over sixty films for the cinema, television and galleries, developing her own documentary-influenced visual language. She was accompanying her last work, No Home Movie, an essay-film about her mother, to European film festivals when she was hospitalised for depression in 2015, and died by suicide soon after. She was 65.