From the East

Traveling and documenting "everything that touched her," from East Germany to Russia, immediately after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, Chantal Akerman paints a portrait of city streets, changing seasons, and the muffled footsteps of people traversing a landscape "no longer monolithically impersonal" (Francette Pacteau) -- a landscape taking its first melancholic breaths as it emerges from the rubble. Akerman keeps people nameless and music minimal, allowing spaces to come alive of their own accord, patiently and hauntingly forming a true cinematic dirge for the people, places, and stories of Eastern Europe.