Chantal Akerman's film might be called a documentary, except that it ignores almost every convention of the genre. The East in From the East is less a place-post-Cold War Eastern Europe and Russia-than it is a space. Her camera shows flat landscapes and ribbons of city streets, modulated by the change of seasons, the succession of day and night. The East is a space of muffled sounds, traversed by the footsteps of passersby, punctuated by clusters of motionless figures, sporadically pierced by music, laughter, and strange interjections. When the camera enters the home, it reveals only carefully posed stagings of solitary reveries. Akerman refuses to narrate, translate, or explain, making this an uncompromising, even demanding, film. In photographing the informal surface of everyday life with meticulous formality, Akerman constructs an uncanny sense of the marvelous in the everyday. The East is shown as both familiar and completely strange.-Francette Pacteau, SFIFF '94