New News from Another Home

New News From Another Home relates to its iconic original like a doppelgänger narrative. Almost fifty years after Chantal Akerman read out letters her mother sent her during her first stay in New York over images of the foreign city’s urban canyons, subway stations and building facades, Borjana Ventzislavova embarks on a personal journey through Akerman’s revered work. Images of the original locations are accompanied by emails from Ventzislavova’s mother, the tone of which is a combination of concern and gentle admonitions (the daughter sometimes writes too rarely and says too little), not unlike Natalia Akerman’s letters. “Dear Bube…” is how the “new news” begins, in which the mother reports about her everyday life in Bulgaria: the weather, health problems, family gatherings.  

News From Home (1976) is part of the collective visual memory and in this way, Ventzislavova’s reenactment inevitably becomes a comparative study along intertwined timelines. In addition to the mother-daughter relationship, the economic and social changes that have left their mark on the topography are reflected: the capitalization of public space, the omnipresence of the digital, the chaos of traffic.  

Unlike the one-sided, unvarying correspondence in the original film, the emails here show an active exchange. With the separation from her mother and her child, and probably also influenced by a traumatic past that echoes through Akerman’s blank spaces, Ventzislavova asks questions about her own family history. The fragments that come to light during the search for clues – with the internment of a relative in the Belene labor camp forming a dark marker – sketch out a multi-generational history between the Iron Curtain, emigration, and the years after the fall of Communism. In the glow of an endtime light, this history continues to have an impact in the present. (Esther Buss)

Translation: John Wojtowicz