Waiting, always waiting—Chantal Akerman filmed a lot of people doing just that. On the street, in the cold, at the station, in the snow, resigned and patient. As she puts it, waiting was one of the legacies of the Soviet Union that she wanted to capture before it was too late.

Made shortly after the collapse of the USSR, Akerman has described this film as a “documentary on the edge of fiction.” She traveled from East Germany via Poland to Moscow and filmed anything that she felt affected by. The resulting film alternates between long, slow-moving tracking shots of countryside and city, and static images of people in their living rooms or kitchens.

Devoid of dialogue and comment, this is a purely visual report from Eastern Europe before the free market radically altered its society. It shows a place where time had stopped at the moment when it is slowly gearing up into motion again.