Là-bas

Akerman’s introspective apartment-bound reflection on isolation and confinement.

Making a film about Israel was initially ‘an impossible idea’. Akerman was ‘scared of the pitfalls of [her] subjectivity’. But her diary film, made while sequestered in her Tel Aviv apartment, dives into this subjectivity with static shots through window blinds accompanied by voiceover musings. Akerman plunges us into her fragile mental state.

She also, as cinematographer Babette Mangolte noted, asks a question often raised in her portraits of confinement: ‘How do we live near others?’