The Cinematheque

“In a film that, agonizingly, depicts women’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force … There was a before and an after Jeanne Dielman, just as there had once been a before and after Citizen Kane.”

Amy Taubin, Sight and Sound

Chantal Akerman’s astonishing chef d’oeuvre, made with an all-female crew in 1975, was immediately recognized as a milestone of feminist cinema and is now regularly cited as one of the greatest films ever made—the greatest, per Sight and Sound​’s 2022 critics’ poll. French luminary Delphine Seyrig plays a Brussels widow and housewife who turns tricks on the side, entertaining gentlemen callers in the modest flat she shares with her sullen teenage son (Jan Decorte). In the film’s meticulous, radically minimalist but remarkably intense chronicle of her highly ordered day-to-day routine, the mundane details of housework—peeling potatoes, for instance, or making a bed—are given no greater narrative weight than other, more dramatically charged goings-on in the apartment. Shot with great precision by Babette Mangolte, Akerman’s film transforms the drudgery of ​“woman’s work” into a hypnotic horror show—and turns the basic ingredients of the 1940s ​“women’s weepie” into a subversive, modernist masterwork.

In French with English subtitles

“Brilliant … A film that changed the face of European cinema.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Akerman conjured up a world and a rhythm of life that had never appeared on the screen before, and did so with an extraordinary and radical beauty, political intelligence, and mastery of both storytelling and filmmaking.” Laura Mulvey, The Criterion Current

The opening-night screening on March 26 will include a video introduction by Andréa Picard, co-curator of the 2019 retrospective ​“News from Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman” at TIFF Cinematheque.