Five female icons of the Belgian art world: Chantal Akerman

30 July 2025

Belga English paints the portraits of five renowned female artists from Belgium – in words. Today we look at Chantal Akerman, a feminist pioneer and fearless cinematic visionary, who influenced the likes of Sofia Coppola and Todd Haynes. She's best known for her work Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, voted best film of all time in 2022.

Walking around the popular Saint Catherine neighbourhood in the centre of Brussels, many must wonder about the mural of a woman sitting at a table in her kitchen, eating a slice of bread.

It's an image of the main character in the iconic film of Brussels-born filmmaker Chantal Akerman – Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Akerman was never a crowd favourite, but she is revered by cinephiles, directors, critics and academics. In 2022, seven years after her death, Jeanne Dielman was voted the best film of all time by the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound, making Akerman the first woman to top the prestigious poll.

The film also had a major impact when it was released in 1975, establishing Akerman’s reputation as a feminist pioneer and cinematic visionary.

Lasting more than three hours, it shows the daily life of a widow and single mother in painstaking detail. The viewer follows her as she peels potatoes, cleans, runs errands, but also works as a prostitute. Very, very slowly, the film turns into a chilling thriller.

“When most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment – for them – is to say, ‘We didn’t notice the time pass!’ With me, you see the time pass and feel it pass, and you also sense that this is the time that leads toward death. During this time, they feel their existence,” Akerman said about her approach in an interview with Artforum.

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Remarkably, Akerman was just 25 at the time of Jeanne Dielman and had already gone through a complex learning process. The first seed was planted at the age of 15, when she watched Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot le fou.

“That was a defining moment in my life,” she told BRUZZ. “Finally, a film that was about how I felt, and not about how my parents or teachers felt.”

Radical cinema

She decided to become a filmmaker and entered a Brussels film school when she was 18, but quickly dropped out and made her first short film: Saute ma ville, or Blow Up My City. In the film, she plays the leading role herself, cheerfully destroying a kitchen as a first expression of a free and radical cinema.

In the early 1970s, Akerman moved to New York for a few years, in search of freedom and inspiration. There, she discovered the experimental cinema of Andy Warhol and Michael Snow.

She also made her first feature film in New York, the documentary Hotel Monterey, about a run-down hotel and its residents. Later, she would use scenes of her exploration of the city in News from Home, accompanied by a narration of letters from her mother outlining the quiet life in Brussels.

"I won’t say I’m a feminist film-maker. I’m not making women’s films, I’m making Chantal Akerman’s films"

New York, with Brussels and Paris, would remain one of the home cities of Akerman, who led a rather nomadic life. The city also serves as the main location of her most mainstream film, A Couch in New York, a romantic comedy starring Juliette Binoche and William Hurt.

But Akerman made her first critically acclaimed film in Belgium, in 1974, shortly after her return from the US. In Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She), she plays a young woman who has affairs with a truck driver and her ex-girlfriend.

The film was particularly noted for its depiction of women’s sexuality, a theme which would appear again in several of her films.

^{Golden Eighties, 1986 © LA CECILIA - PARADISE FILMS - LIMBO FILM AG / COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL VIA AFP}

Akerman was quickly labelled by many as a feminist filmmaker, but she refused to be categorised in any limited way.

“I won’t say I’m a feminist film-maker,” she said in a 1979 interview with film academic Angela Martin. “I’m not making women’s films, I’m making Chantal Akerman’s films.”

"That was a defining moment in my life. Finally, a film that was about how I felt, and not about how my parents or teachers felt"

As her filmography shows, those “Chantal Akerman films” are extremely diverse. Throughout her career, the director wandered between genres.

After a movie about romantic encounters during a summer night in Brussels (Toute une nuit), she first made a musical about young hairstylists at a mall who fall in love with the same man (Golden Eighties) and then shot a documentary about life in post-Communist Eastern Europe (D’Est).

She looked back on her own youth in Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles, reflected on the loneliness of a young film director in the semi-autobiographical Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and tried her hand at literary adaptation with La Captive, based on Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière. She also made video and installation art and published a play and two books of fiction.

However, there are recurring methods and themes in her work. Long takes and the accentuating of the passage of time are among the most influential trademarks of her style.

Major influence

Filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola have mentioned her as a major source of inspiration for their own experiments with filming in real time. In French paper Libération, Todd Haynes stated that watching her films was “one of those experiences that change your way of thinking, of seeing, of imagining cinema”.

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Akerman primarily dealt with personal and intimate subjects in her work, constantly reflecting on identity, belonging, memory, feminism, gender and sexuality.

She was greatly influenced by her own family history, as a child of Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland after surviving the Holocaust. Her mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, where her own parents were murdered.

Complex relationship

The complex relationship with her mother is the topic of Akerman’s last film, No Home Movie, from 2015. It’s largely shot in her mother’s kitchen, in the final months before her mother’s death in 2014.

In the same year her final film was released, Akerman took her own life in Paris, having struggled with depression for years.

Akerman’s life and cinema were also deeply influenced by cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, her life partner for more than 30 years. Under her guidance, music played an increasingly important role in Akerman’s films.

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