The vast gulf posed between public spaces and private emotions, long a thematic preoccupation for Akerman, received its most potent, distilled form with News From Home, a nakedly simple, remarkably affecting diary film made during Akerman’s first tenure in New York. Juxtaposing documentary images of Manhattan streets with narrated letters addressed to Akerman by her mother overseas, the film creates an immediate dissonance between sound and image that goes unabated from beginning to end. The scenes captured at length by Akerman’s 16mm camera describe a long-lost Big Apple of roads where trash blows like tumbleweed, of depopulated convenience stores and laundromats, and of imposing concrete slabs untainted by modern branding, forging an impression of both enveloping gloominess and endearing urban character. Akerman's complex relationship to the city is one of fascination and repulsion—further complicated by her evident nostalgia for home, which shows through even as the missives she impassively recites turn gradually from loving to hectoring. It’s all capped by one of the director’s greatest parting shots, a farewell to the city skyline that is simultaneously relieving and ominous.