16/11/2025
Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels in 1950 to Polish Jewish parents; her mother, Natalia, survived Auschwitz, and that trauma — the silence around it, the way memory hides in domestic detail — shaped nearly every frame of Akerman’s work.
She discovered cinema at 15 after seeing Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, and soon enrolled at the Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle — only to drop out and begin making films independently. At 18 she made Saute ma ville (1968), a chaotic, explosive short that introduced her lifelong themes: confinement, domesticity, female solitude, routine, and rebellion.
Akerman’s landmark film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a three-and-a-half-hour portrait of a widowed mother moving through her domestic routine in real time. It broke every rule of filmmaking. It invented a new cinematic grammar based on duration, stillness, gesture, silence, and the politics of the everyday.
In 2022, Jeanne Dielman was ranked the #1 Greatest Film of All Time by Sight & Sound — the first time a woman ever topped the list.
Throughout her career, she made more than 40 films: experimental, narrative, autobiographical, and essayistic. Her work explored borders, exile, desire, mother–daughter relationships, and the quiet violence of ordinary life. She moved between Brussels, Paris, and New York, capturing displacement with an unmatched emotional intelligence.
Her mother’s death in 2014 devastated her, and Akerman died by su***de in 2015. In the years since, her influence has only grown — on filmmakers, feminists, artists, and anyone who sees the political power in the ordinary, the overlooked, the routine.
