A documentary by Chantal Akerman. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

In a sad twist, legendary filmmaker Chantal Akerman herself died last fall—probably by suicide—soon after her beloved mother’s death. Her final film, the facetiously titled No Home Movie, presages both passages.

That setup makes this two-hour Movie sound fairly dramatic, while the reality is anything but. Akerman tests your patience right from the start, with almost five minutes of a tree blowing in a windstorm. Later, there are even longer segments showing uneventful drives across an unnamed desert (presumably in Israel, where the Belgian director lived part-time). And even after we first see Natalia Akerman puttering around her neat Brussels apartment, it’s almost 30 minutes before anyone speaks.

Once they start gabbing, whether in the kitchen or sometimes by phone or Skype, there are nuggets of information, occasionally about how Akerman’s Polish-born parents (barely) escaped the Holocaust and came to Belgium, where Chantal would be born, in 1950. And there is much evidence of the deep love between daughter and maman. But the film, shot entirely on low-grade digital cameras and rarely framed for beauty, is stingy with rewards. It also depends heavily on the viewer’s investment in her history with cinema and kitchens—especially regarding formally rigorous breakthrough films like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels and the short “Saute ma ville”, which depicted women held captive by their domesticity, and their unpredictably violent reactions to that.

Both those tales, among others, are excerpted and explicated by the chain-smoking filmmaker in I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman, an illuminating hourlong doc paired opening night and one further date with No Home Movie.