‘I want people to experience film in their body.’
– Chantal Akerman

‘Where are you Anna?’ drifts a voice out of an answerphone in Akerman’s mesmerising 1978 road trip Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (The Meetings of Anna). We could ask the same of the Belgian auteur. For where do we place her cinema? Across 40 films, Anna is one of many stand-ins for the director, who was ahead of her time making introspective odysseys from an innately feminist, queer, and Jewish perspective but who believed ‘all labels have to be thrown away’. Akerman had many deep-rooted obsessions beyond self-portraiture: confinement, mother-daughter relationships, exile, anxiety and loneliness, desire and the impossibility of human connection. But she never repeated herself. Her formally audacious films of the 70s, exemplified by Jeanne Dielman, reckoned with cinema’s essence – time and space – but her obsessions would go on to surface in comedies, musicals and romances, literary adaptations, documentaries which wander into fiction and more. ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ she famously said. The same is true of her restless, uncategorisable cinema.

-          Isabel Stevens, BFI

5 By Akerman at Showroom Cinema throughout August

A retrospective of the work of filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

1-3 August | Je Tu Il El (18)

Akerman’s ambiguous triptych was based on her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels.

8-10 August | Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (15)

Akerman’s opus was voted the greatest film of all time and is arguably the greatest film about time.

15-17 August | News From Home (U)

This beautiful time capsule of 1970s New York City is Akerman’s most elegantly minimalist film.

22-24 August | The Meetings of Anna (15)

An accomplished filmmaker makes her way through a series of Western European cities.

29-31 August | Golden Eighties (12A)

Akerman’s exuberant but subversive musical about the romantic entanglements of salon workers.