In Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, static shots of New York streets, subways, and buildings were overlaid with letters from Akerman’s loving—sometimes anxious—mother back in Brussels. The film becomes a meditation on displacement, longing, and the fragile ties between two cities.

Cai Sheng-yu:
How have you been? Summer in Montreal has been nurturing. I often bike along the canal. When I rest, people try to speak to me in French—I feel clumsy as an Anglophone. My hometown has a canal too; my dad used to take me boating there as a kid.

The other day I watched the Shibuya Crossing live webcam, overwhelmed by the tides of human flow on my screen. I wondered if I’d recognize your face among them.

In Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, HK couple Fai and Ho travel to Buenos Aires, the city at HK’s antipode, allured by the question: “How will HK look from the other side of the world?” In their cramped apartment, intimacy becomes a reconstruction of home, a distant echo of HK through estrangement.

Ru:
Osh, I miss you- the time difference sucks. I watched one of Denis Villeneuve’s early films at an arthouse cinema in Tokyo; some scenes looked just like your Montreal posts.

Did you know Montreal’s antipode is the Kerguelen Islands—a French territory in the Indian Ocean? Even on the other side of the planet, it’s still France—it feels both absurd and sad.