REVERSE SHOT'S TOP 10 OF 2016

Well, ok, it's a top 12 due to ties. But anyway, you can always rely on Reverse Shot to insert a dash of sense into awards season with their annual Best Of list. This year, they've chosen Chantal Akerman's brilliant final film, No Home Movie, as their favourite of 2016, in a list that gives prominence to female filmmakers in its top two slots. Excellent choices all around!

Best Film

1. No Home Movie

2. Toni Erdmann

3. Cemetery of Splendour

4. Cameraperson

5. Aquarius

6. Moonlight

7. Right Now, Wrong Then

=  Sunset Song

9. Silence

10. Certain Women

=   Knight of Cups

12. The Illinois Parables

REVIEW - NO HOME MOVIE (CHANTAL AKERMAN)

What makes a home a home? At what point does a point on the planet become one's own, not one's own property but a part of one's own persona? People populate spaces in Chantal Akerman's films, and vacate them too. Their presence gives purpose, furnishing these spaces with a practical identity; their absence raises the question of whether or not such spaces could be claimed to function, even to exist without them. Absence courses through No Home Movie, which indeed is no home movie, from the perspective of a person depicted as homeless, nomadic, and centring on another person, whose perception of home is at once narrowing, intensifying and fading away. Akerman's film is stark and unyielding as ever, and even more oblique than usual, in its dedication to a feeling of dislocation, expressed in intentionally, beautifully, aggravatingly tedious shots of arid desert landscapes. It's a self-portrait, one in which the subject is, of course, absent, and the effect is contemplative, chilling, and eventually horribly sad. Akerman is present in the home of her mother, present for the past, pored over in colloquial conversations that are a real treasure to behold; she is present and yet absent, rarely seen, often detected, never truly, wholly there. It's a particularly poignant association to make, connecting this thought of not actually participating in one's life with the fact that No Home Movie was this genius filmmaker's final artistic expression before committing suicide. That, and in serving as a chronicle for the event - the death of her mother - which many conclude may have precipitated her own death, makes this film an even more profound emotional accomplishment than a technical one. See it, and be thankful for what home you may have.

OBIT - CHANTAL AKERMAN

Very sad news today, the 6th of October 2015, as the world learns of the death of influential Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. A leading light in avant-garde cinema as far back as the 1960s and one of the foremost female directors of all time, Akerman will forever be remembered for her indelible contribution to cinema over dozens of seminal, brilliant features. A director of full-length and short films both, of fiction and documentary, she made her debut with 1968's short Saute Ma Ville at only 18 years of age, having enrolled at the Institut National Superieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion. She moved to New York in 1972, though continued to make films in her first language, French. Over her decades-long career, those included some of the most important art films of the era, such as I, You, He, She, News from Home, The Meetings of Anna, Toute Une Nuit, The Captive, Almayer's Folly and 1975's classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has rightly been recognised by several writers and film polls as one of the greatest films in history. This very year, she premiered her final film at the Locarno International Film Festival, the documentary No Home Movie, which received typically strong reviews from attending critics, and which also booked a slot recently at the New York Film Festival. Despite being considered by many of the great feminist filmmakers, and one of the most essential LGBT voices in cinema, she often refuted the specificity of these identities, aspects to her character which some found troublesome, though which reflect and inform much of her artistic output. Over her career, she was nominated not only for Locarno's Golden Leopard, but the Golden Lion at Venice, the Golden Bear at Berlin, the Bronze Horse at Stockholm and the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary, where she won the Ecumenical Jury Prize for 1996's A Couch in New York; she was also nominated for a Cesar Award for her 2006 documentary Down There. At only 65 at time of passing, this extraordinary talent will be very deeply missed by the international film-watching community. We shall continue to treasure her films, which will live on for as long as we do. May they live forever!