Born in Brussels, Belgium, Chantal Akerman (1950 - 2015) was a filmmaker whose work gave new meaning to the term "independent film." An Akerman film is an exercise in pure independence, creativity and art. Her viewers must give themselves over completely to the experience of her films and watch with open minds. Strong themes in her films include women at work and at home, women's relationships to men, women, and children, food, love, sex, romance, art and storytelling. Each Akerman film is a world to be explored on its own terms.
Her films are the subject of numerous books including Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everday by Ivone Margulies.
Chantal Akerman died in Paris, France, in 2015, having forever changed the history of cinema.
Icarus Films is proud to distribute eight films (and a 5-disc box set!) by Chantal Akerman, plus two documentaries on her life and work. Discover more of our featured filmmakers.
"Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation." —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice"Akerman the filmmaker came of age at the same time as the new age of feminism, and [her films] became key texts in the nascent field of feminist film theory. Feminism posed the apparently simple question of who speaks when a woman in film speaks (as character, as director ...); Akerman insisted convincingly that her films' modes of address rather than their stories alone are the locus of their feminist perspective. The many arguments about what form a 'new women's cinema' should take revolved around a presumed dichotomy between so-called realist (meaning accessible) and avant-garde (meaning elitist) work; Akerman's films rendered such distinctions irrelevant and illustrated the reductiveness of the categories." —Janet Bergstrom, Sight and Sound
"The films of Chantal Akerman are the single most important and coherent body of work by a woman director in the history of the cinema." —Film Center Gazette of the School of the Art Institute
"Chantal Akerman spoke to each of us, intimately, as if we were the only one in the room when she was talking to us, the only one in front of the projected image when we are in the theatre or the museum/gallery space where her installations are exhibited. [This] this is a cinema that burns in us, that lives in us, a cinema that we have inherited, a cinema that will continue through us. We are her orphans, but also her heirs." —Senses of Cinema
