Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels on 6 June 1950. At the age of 15, she discovers Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou by chance, which inspired her to take up filmmaking. Entering the Brussels film school (INSAS) in 1967, she left straight away, rejecting the rigid framework of the school. The following year she made her first short film, Saute ma ville, first expression of a free and radical cinema. Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she discovered the experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow, which had a profound influence on the films she made there (La Chambre, Hotel Monterey).  

On her return to Belgium, she directed Je tu il elle and then raised the necessary funds to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. This film about the daily life of a housewife, an essential piece of feminist cinema and presented at the Cannes Fortnight in 1975, brought her international recognition and remains a major cinematic experiment in the history of cinema, studied and admired for decades. In December 2022, the film was named the best film of all time by the British magazine Sight&Sound.

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