Chantal Akerman

We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

"Going through my mini DVs shot over the past decade, I rediscovered a forgotten night sequence of Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie where we had dined together in Montparnasse. The excerpt stayed with me for a while. This prompted me to focus on Chantal’s sound work in her films and her very close collaboration with cellist, Sonia Wieder-Atherton with whom she made more than 20 films. And, since New York, Paris and Moscow were places the three of us had in common, I intertwined some of my images with hers."

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

An in-depth, behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Chantal Akerman's 2011 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's book about a merchant, whose dreams of riches for his daughter are shattered by his greed and prejudice.

This visual essay, produced in 2023, builds upon rare radio interviews that Chantal Akerman gave in 1975 and 1977, in which she reflects on her films and her ascendance to critical success.

An analysis of the work of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), an experimental and innovative artist, both in content and form, who has left her mark on cultural memory and on the creations of other artists.

Jake and Mati are two outsiders in the northerly Portuguese city of Porto who once experienced a brief connection. A mystery remains about the moments they shared, and in searching through memories, they relive the depths of a night uninhibited by the consequences of time.

Filmmaker José Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world's major cities.

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.

Invented by the post-New Wave, the exercise is well-known: put a filmmaker in the frame, make him talk about his career, evoke his admirations, rummage in his methods, and add words to silences, spoken images to seen images. It’s always very instructive. As is the case here too. Chantal Akerman, passing through South America, talks about herself for an hour, and it’s fascinating. Even if her recalling of the relationship between the cinema and time makes up only a few rare minutes.

I Don’t Belong Anywhere - Le Cinéma de Chantal Akerman, explores some of the Belgian filmmaker’s 40 plus films. From Brussels to Tel-Aviv, from Paris to New-York, this documentary charts the sites of her peregrinations. An experimental filmmaker, a nomad, Chantal Akerman shares her cinematic trajectory, one that has never ceased to interrogate the the meaning of her existence. Thanks in great part to the interventions of her editor, Claire Atherton, she delineates the origins of her film language and her aesthetic stance.

Akerman films her mother Natalia, an elderly woman of Polish origin, in her Brussels apartment. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. Also, and to show how small the world has become, Chantal remains in contact with her mother at other times of the year via Skype from lands as far away from Belgium as Oklahoma or New York.

Ibro Hasanović met Chantal Akerman in 2014. From their recent friendship, this film was born, where the director reflects on her childhood, her work, and what "belonging" means to her.

A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal's personality. Forty years of friendship condensed into four minutes...

In August 2012, Chantal Akerman went scouting in the American South with the idea of shooting a documentary there, inspired by the story of Jake England. A project she ended up abandoning.

“My mother laughs prelude” is a performance from the book that Chantal made about her mother. In 2013, Akerman’s mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn’t talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. "My Mother Laughs" is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Interview with the Belgian director discussing her films from the 1970s and her mother’s influence on her work.

What Lies Beneath the Sky is a portrait of New York City hit by hurricane Sandy shot in Super 8.

Akerman spends a month in Tel Aviv, in an apartment by the sea, contemplating childhood, family, and her Jewish identity.

From the Other Side is a haunting and minimalist documentary that explores the tragic realities of illegal immigration along the U.S.–Mexico border, focusing on the twin towns of Agua Prieta, Sonora, and Douglas, Arizona. Director Chantal Akerman utilizes her signature long, observational takes and static shots to capture the harsh desert landscape and the architectural starkness of the border wall. Through deeply personal interviews with Mexican migrants and grieving families, contrasted against the high-tech tracking systems and perspectives of white American ranchers, the film highlights how tightened border security forced migrants into increasingly perilous terrain. Ultimately, the documentary serves as a poetic, empathetic, and politically charged meditation on xenophobia, separation, and the human cost of geographic boundaries.

El Pampero records Chantal Akerman's visit to Argentina in 2005.

Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.

"To begin with, we have Babette Mangolte, the camera technician on Hotel Monterey, La Chambre and Jeanne Dielman, but who for me also symbolises the New York years, she introduced me into the very core of what was new, even revolutionary, in New York, and our interview is about the city of New York in the early 70s." – Chantal Akerman

What a revelation and a privilege it is to see Chantal Akerman at work. Its French title a pun, this film offers behind-the-scenes footage from the production of Tomorrow We Move: makeup and costume tests, script readings, scene blocking and rehearsals, and on-set interviews with Aurore Clément and Sylvie Testud, her lead actresses, as well as Akerman herself.

"Aurore, my friend, Aurore, the main actress of Rendez-vous d'Anna and other films of mine, our meeting, the why and how of our joint work". – Chantal Akerman

In this 2007 interview, an off-camera Chantal Akerman interviews her mother about her films. The producers of the interview originally intended to edit out Akerman’s questions but ultimately decided to keep them in to preserve the candor of the mother-daughter rapport.

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

What makes European cinema so special? Find out in Paul Joyce’s feature-length documentary, Pictures of Europe, which examines the differences between American independent and Hollywood movies and films from European directors. Featuring luminary iconoclasts from European cinema such as Agnes Varda, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pedro Almodovar, as well as American counterpoints from Paul Schrader, and those who have crossed back and forth, such as Paul Verhoeven

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Janine Bazin and André Labarthe approached Chantal Akerman about making a film for the series; eagerly, Akerman proposed a number of filmmakers—but all had already been done. So she suggested…“How about me?” Akerman creates a fascinating self-portrait that takes us through her career, aided by critics Emmanuel Burdeau and Jean Narboni and filmmaker Luc Moullet.

Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

Belgian director Chantal Akerman struggles to overcome her laziness in the name of making a film about the subject.

Chantal Akerman meets with elderly Jewish women in Paris, all of them survivors of the Shoah, and listens to their family stories. Between interviews, Akerman's mother Natalia speaks of her own family. Made for a French miniseries on grandmothers.

Chantal Akerman followed famous Choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers, The Tanzteater Wuppertal, for five weeks while they were on tour in Germany, Italy and France. Her objective was to capture Pina Bausch's unparalleled art not only on stage by behind the scenes.

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

Chantal Akerman was commissioned by Visions to make this short film for £20,000. It was first shown on 21 November 1984, on Channel 4. Akerman herself plays the role of a director visiting Hollywood to find financing from an uncle she hardly knows. Very little goes to plan… Also stars Aurore Clement and Colleen Camp.

Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.

A filmmaker’s self-portrait, asking hard questions of herself and of us. Invoking Aurore Clément as a kind of stand-in or proxy, a glamorous counterpart to Akerman who sports a drawn-on moustache. What is cinema for? Who is it for? If the Mosaic prohibition on making graven images includes film images, then where does that leave a Jewish filmmaker?

Documentary about women in the film industry. Numerous notable actresses and female directors share their thoughts.

A sensitivity to sounds coming from the activities of an unwelcome guest in the close quarters of an apartment is only one important component in this atmospheric, avant-garde drollery by Chantal Akerman. When the apartment owner comes home, her guest is settled in and at first, the slightly reclusive host decides simply to eat her breakfast in her room instead of having to face morning conversation with her guest. Sounds of the toilet flushing, the bath water running and splashing, footsteps pacing, and furniture moving invade the hostess' refuge in her bedroom like the frontrunners of an all-out offensive. She locks herself up for 28 days, life's detritus accumulating around her, just so she does not have to go out to face the nemesis that lurks beyond her door.

A young film director is making a movie with his friend Christa. In the film-within-the-film there are two couples, one real, one imagined, and the film - told through five dreams - is as much the story of a film in-production, as the birth of a child.

Commissioned for the centenary of the famous French architect and designer Robert Mallet-Stevens and shot on the street that bears his name in Paris' 16th arrondissement, Rue Mallet-Stevens depicts a mysterious, nocturnal scene of romance (featuring Akerman and her partner, the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton) unfolding before and inside one of the street's modernist constructions.

Documentary exploring why Belgian television doesn't invest more money in Belgian cinema as is the case in e.g. the netherlands.

No synopsis available yet.

A lonely young widow lives with her son following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon.

A woman suffers a subdued psychological breakdown in the wake of a devastating breakup.

Impersonal and beautiful images of Akerman's life in New York are combined with letters from her loving but manipulative mother, read by Akerman herself.

Akerman, by using 360° camera pans, explores the space of a small room like a succession of still lifes : a chair, fruits on a table, solitary objects in waiting. Amidst this thread of movement, there is only one living figure: a young woman, sitting on a bed.

In this unfinished work, a young mother, her little girl, as well as a friend of the mother's, spend the summer in a villa. The mother shares her problems – womanhood, motherhood, being married - with her friend, dresses up with the little girl, observes her body, and does a series of household tasks.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

No synopsis available yet.

During the filming of "Jeanne Dielman" Sami Frey recorded what was happening on the set. A film about a film in the making.

In this recently rediscovered home movie, three women—Chantal Akerman, Babette Mangolte, and Epp Kotkas—share a precious moment of laughter and friendship while filming Hotel Monterey in 1972 in New York.

The beginnings of Chantal Akerman behind the camera at the ages of 17 and 18: four films shot in Super 8 during the summer, presented to enter the National Higher Institute of Performing Arts and Broadcasting Techniques (INSAS, Brussels) in September 1967, where she was accepted.

Suburbs of Brussels. A young woman locks herself in the kitchen of her apartment, as she blissfully devotes herself to dismantling the household chores, frenetically humming as she goes. A burlesque pamphlet against female alienation.

A 3rd short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman in Knokke to be used to be accepted at INSAS starring her friends her mother and herself.