Maternal Instincts
My Mother Laughs
By Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp
The Song Cave, $20
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN 2013, AND NOW available in an English translation by the poet and critic Corina Copp, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s is a shattering memoir about her octogenarian. Unfolding in a nonlinear associational style that mirrors Akerman’s fluctuating psyche during trying times, charts her symbiotic love-hate relationship with her mother Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor whose traumatic past never ceased to haunt the director and her work since her seminal 1975 breakthrough, .
