My Mother Laughs Prelude

My mother laughs prelude is a performance from the book that Chantal made about her mother In 2013 Akermans mother was dying She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her and between dressing her feeding her and putting her to bed she wrote She wrote about her childhood the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didnt talk about the difficulty of loving her girlfriend C her fear of what she would do when her mother did die Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life she placed stills from her films My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all that between a mother and a daughter