Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
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, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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Battleship Potemkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1925 • Soviet Union
This incredibly influential Soviet silent film depicts a crew mutiny on the Russian Battleship Potemkin.
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Sans Soleil
Directed by Chris Marker • 1983 • France
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement ...
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Touki bouki
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty • 1973 • Senegal
Starring Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, Aminata FallWith a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a fractured portrait of the disenchantment of postindependence Senegal in the early 1970s. In this picaresque f...
