Film shot through blinds of Tel Aviv flat features at Barbican Cinema
‘Là Bas’ by Chantal Akerman is one of the curated first-person documentaries due to feature on the cinema's new on-demand streaming platform
A film shot entirely through the blinds of a Tel Aviv apartment is one of the curated first-person documentaries due to feature in the Barbican Cinema’s new on-demand streaming platform beginning this week.
‘Là Bas,’ an experimental 2006 film from Chantal Akerman, looks out at life from a flat during her month-long teaching course, and is described as an exploration of Israeli society and Jewish identity.
Akerman was the Belgian child of Holocaust survivors and the film, among her least known, was picked for the London institution’s first fully curated and themed season called ‘Inner States,’ dedicated to the art of the first-person documentary.
The category describes any non-fiction film in which the director does not assume a stand-off, all-seeing perspective “but leans into their subjective point of view and experience”.
Akerman, who died in Paris five years ago aged 65, directed and exhibited artistic films around the world, and spoke extensively of her fraught relationship with her mother, Nelly, who survived Auschwitz.
Other films appearing in the Barbican line-up are Palestinian film-maker Raed Andoni’s 2009 film ‘Fix Me, an investigation of his place in the Palestinian uprising and its aftermath, as well as Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi’s ‘This Is Not a Film,’ which charts his house arrest and film-making ban by Iranian censors.
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