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 The Immigrants
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¡Alambrista!
Directed by Robert M. Young • 1977 • United States
Starring Domingo Ambriz, Trinidad Silva, Linda GillinIn ¡ALAMBRISTA!, a Mexican farmworker sneaks across the border to California to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromisin...
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Stroszek
Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens ScheitzWerner Herzog’s tragically absurd tour through 1970s America stars the singular Bruno S. as an ostracized, alcoholic Berlin street musician who, joined by a prostitute (Eva Mattes) and his eccentric el...
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. . . And the Pursuit of Happiness
Directed by Louis Malle • 1986 • United States
In 1986, Louis Malle, himself a transplant to the United States, set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers (from teachers to astronauts to doctors) in middle- and working-c...
