D’est (From the East). 1993. Belgium/France. 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.
Filmed from East Germany to Moscow between the summer and deep winter of 1993, Chantal Akerman’s dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet Union captures “everything that touched me” through deliberately paced tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic scenes. A travelogue through landscapes and overcrowded urban centers—whose interminable tableaux of train and bus queues become a sobering metaphor of historic upheaval—D’est chronicles everyday Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians staring down an uncertain future. Claire Atherton recalls editing this landmark film: “It was like a composition, both in the musical and visual sense. We were sculpting in time and space, looking for the right rhythm. We were editing in the same way Chantal had shot the film, following our intuition, without trying to understand. We said simple things to each other about color, clashes, ruptures, night and day, exterior and interior, violence, softness, the sound of footsteps in the snow or of tires screeching on icy roads…. Words only appeared a year later, like echoes to the images, when we were editing the installation D’est, au bord de la fiction (1995). These words became those of the installation’s 25th screen, spoken by Chantal: ‘Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, there were, there will be, there are at this very moment, / people whom history, which no longer even has a capital H, whom history has struck down.’”