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A structuralist essay film with long static takes that combines carefully framed images of 1970s New York (streets, subway stations, building facades) with a soundtrack of the city's sounds and Akerman's voiceover. The camera remains at a distance and does not react to what is happening in front of it. Street noise that sometimes drowns out the filmmaker's voice can be heard. Chantal Akerman monotonously and emotionlessly reads 20 letters from her mother, written from Brussels to her as a 20-year-old who left for New York to become a filmmaker - they are affectionate, fretful and insistent. The film is characterized by the tension between sound and image, intimacy and distance, family and the world.