‘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