Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker widely regarded as one of the most important directors in the history of cinema. Her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — a three-and-a-half-hour study of a widowed housewife's routines — was voted the greatest film ever made in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, the first film directed by a woman to top the list. Her landmark Je Tu Il Elle (1974), in which she herself starred, depicted lesbian desire with a frankness almost unheard of in its era, and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels (1994) returned to queer adolescent longing. Though her films engaged directly with desire and queer female subjectivity, Akerman resisted labels and declined to have her work programmed as "lesbian cinema," insisting on its universality. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose presence haunts much of her work, she completed No Home Movie (2015), about her mother's final years, shortly before she died by suicide in 2015.