Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, producer, artist and writer born in Brussels. At the age of 15, she discovers Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) by chance, which inspired her to take up filmmaking. Entering the Brussels film school (INSAS) in 1967, she left straight away, rejecting its rigid framework. The following year, she made her debut short film, Saute ma ville (1968), 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 such as La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1972). 

On her return to Belgium, she directed I, You, He, She (1974) and then raised the necessary funds to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). This film, depicting the daily life of a housewife, is a landmark of feminist cinema. Premiered at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes in 1975, it brought her international acclaim and remains a groundbreaking cinematic experiment—studied and admired for decades. In December 2022, the film was named the best film of all time by the British magazine Sight and Sound. 

An indefatigable artist, Akerman traces her path freely, defying narrative and geographical boundaries to wander between genres, tackling in turn fiction, documentary, musical comedy and literary adaptation. 

Her filmography numbers some fifty films and has been widely shown and acclaimed across the world. Akerman is considered one of the most important and influential European directors of her generation, thanks to her modernity, her visionary treatment of images, time and space, and the reflections that run through her films – on identity, belonging, memory, feminism, gender and sexuality.