D’est (From the East). 1993. Belgium/France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. 2K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; DCP courtesy Icarus Films. No dialogue. 115 min.
In Chantal Akerman’s incisive dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet empire, bullet holes from the Second World War still pockmark the old stone buildings. The filmmaker journeys from East Germany to Moscow between the late summer and winter of 1993 (“while there’s still time”), chronicling in deliberately paced tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic tableaux yet another moment of radical upheaval in the 20th century, the faces and bodies of Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians weighed down with obedient resignation and uncertainty. They exist—and merely that—in a purgatory of trudging and waiting, in potato fields and railway stations, on snow-impeded roads, street corners, and food lines. A tree billowing with fresh green leaves offers hope. A yellow traffic light flashes caution. After seeing what she had created, Akerman observed, “From the East is a film that has to do with camps, with war, helplessness. The camps were a multitude of bodies thrown around. That’s when I make the faces emerge.” Images of her mother, a survivor of the camps, are never far from consciousness, and Akerman’s vision of the old world is of “all these countries, in full mutation, which have lived a common history since the war, still very marked by this history even in the very folds of the earth and whose paths now diverge.”