No Kidding Press and Garage present a book by filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
In 2013, Chantal Akerman’s mother was seriously ill. The book My Mother Laughs was born from the writing practice that accompanied the experience of caring for the ailing woman. Dressing and feeding her mother and putting her to bed, Akerman writes about her family and her childhood, how her mother was saved from Auschwitz, about the torturous relationship with the young woman S., and about the fear of her mother’s death. My Mother Laughs brings together the key themes that Akerman explored throughout her career. Her melancholic voice, faithfully attentive to the private and the liminal, captures raw everyday life and reveals its stitches, speaking about alienation and the search for a foundation.
Akerman’s film is dedicated to her mother Natalia, a concentration camp survivor who passed away in 2014.
“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms, and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment […]. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”