Swan Song

Synopsis: An interweaving of stories about artists and their last recorded works – some: beautiful love letters to life and others: glimpses into troubled minds – created in their final act of life, often just months before their death.

David Bowie’s Blackstar

Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie

No Home Movie is haunted by two ghosts. The subject of Chantal Akerman’s film is her mother, Natalia, who passed away in April 2014 at age of 86, and the director herself who died in 2015, shortly after the film’s world premiere. Akerman may not have originally intended for No Home Movie to be her swansong, but there is the inescapable feeling of a chapter being closed with this film. Akerman’s relationship with her mother was one of the themes that united her eclectic body of work, with Natalia being a key figure in many of her installation pieces and most memorably in her 1977 film, News From Home, to which No Home Movie feels like a companion piece. –Little White Lies

Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la Vida

“Thanks to life that has given me so much… laughter… and tears so I can tell happiness from grief… The two things my song is made of… the song of you… my own song.”

The final lyrics of the song Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to Life) by Violeta Parra composed before she committed suicide in 1967.