After the feature Jeanne Dielman brought her international acclaim, Akerman returned to the personal avant-garde essay format to evoke New York City in News from Home, shot by Babette Mangolte. We see the city through the eyes of a Belgian girl from a petit bourgeois background--not the New York of glamor and New World success, but the city of ordinary people, unemployed, washed-up, coming and going on the subways and sidewalks. As she tries to find a personality or a biography behind the faces, and somehow to define herself among them, the worried voice of her mother forms a counterpointal soundtrack. “In relation to what I was experiencing,” Akerman writes, “(my mother's letters were) very moving. Like a kind of amorous complaint, repetitive, always accompanying me. For my mother, who is from old Europe, America is still the myth.... The film seems to me to be very European, it's a film of construction...a film about being off-center...like a hold that is slipping.”