The Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation is pleased to invite you to another chapter of INSIGHTS. For this next session, we are excited to welcome Céline Brouwez from Cinematek and the Chantal Akerman Foundation.

Founded in 2017, the Chantal Akerman Foundation aims to preserve Akerman’s body of Art, including the archives and all the works. By assembling, maintaining and protecting the rights of Chantal Akerman and of her works, the Foundation also strives to foster the knowledge, appreciation and study of her oeuvre, and help perpetuate the dissemination and conservation of her films and archives. In order to achieve these goals, the Fondation Chantal Akerman joined forces with CINEMATEK. 

About Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels on 6 June 1950. At the age of 15, she discovered 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.