Two films structured by epistolary relationships between mothers and daughters resonate with the themes of distance and communication rife throughout Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s oeuvre, particularly her 1982 novel-poem, Dictée. Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, comprising footage from the Belgian filmmaker’s time living in New York, juxtaposes urban anomie with an intimate voice-over of her mother’s letters. In Measures of Distance, Mona Hatoum fills the screen with her mother’s letters, the Arabic text imprinted on a figure of a nude woman acting as a scrim through which the pain of exile and migration resulting from the Lebanese civil war is made palpable.

—Tausif Noor