Directors like Todd Haynes, Sally Potter and Michael Haneke have credited Ms. Akerman as a major influence. J. Hoberman, a former film critic for The Village Voice, likened her to Mr. Godard and to the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, calling her “arguably the most important European director of her generation.”

From the outset, Ms. Akerman was captivated by the violence that can erupt from the quotidian. Her first film, “Saute Ma Ville” (“Blow Up My City”), was a 13-minute black-and-white short that she made at 18 after dropping out of film school in Belgium. With a voice-over of cheerful humming and singing, the film shows her dancing about her kitchen, then leaning her head on gaslit burners before the screen goes dark and the room explodes.

Angst and alienation permeate Ms. Akerman’s films, which numbered more than 40. She sought to break free of linear narratives and direct explication in both her cinematic essays and her documentary work, preferring instead to leave essential things unsaid. The generational trauma of the Holocaust was a continuing theme, though below the surface. In recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity.

“No Home Movie” captures long conversations between Ms. Akerman and her ailing mother, Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014.

Making the film, which circles around her mother’s inability to talk about her experience at the death camp, took a heavy emotional toll on Ms. Akerman. “I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it,” she told The New York Times in a recent interview.