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New York streets, subway cars, empty avenues, traffic. Over the images, letters from the director's mother are read aloud. She asks how her daughter is, sends money, wants her to come home. The city does not answer. Chantal Akerman directed and reads the letters herself. Akerman had gone from Belgium to New York in her early twenties; the film brings the footage shot then together with her mother's real letters years later. The method is fixed and stubborn: long takes, a motionless camera, no editorial intervention. Some shots run for minutes with nothing happening. The sound design creates the real tension. Subway and traffic noise sometimes drowns the voice entirely and the letters become inaudible, which is the distance the film is about. The closing shot, taken from a ferry moving away from Manhattan, counts among the best-known endings in experimental cinema. Who it is for: viewers curious about experimental documentary and Akerman. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; the film tells nothing on purpose.