In the summer of 1976, Chantal Akerman returned to New York City (where she had spent the early 1970s working odd jobs and pursuing her filmmaking dreams within the city's avant-garde film scene) to make News From Home. One of her most influential films, News From Home is a deceptively simple staging of a battle between sound and image as a metonym for a mother tugging at her self-actualizing daughter. Long takes of New York are accompanied by Akerman's delicate voice reading letters from her mother Nelly. Like those of an Ozu matriarch, Nelly's words are mundane in subject matter but passive-aggressive in tone, rather cleverly collating gossip and remarks on the weather with complaints about the distance between Akerman and her family. Against the pull of the mother's writing, the daughter's cinema pushes back: passersby stare into the camera and the tripod appears in the window; the city cacophony drowns out the fragile voice of home. As is characteristic of Akerman's brilliant comedic timing, the interjecting noise of the city functions as a sigh, a groan, breaking the suffocating tension between the women. When asked to comment on the film in 2011, Akerman stated: "I love it. Still not free from my mother."