Celebrity Biographies
Chantal Akermann
A very sad story, because the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman put an end to her life on Monday, October 5, 2015 in Paris. The pioneer of experimental cinema of the 70s, very focused on describing the situation of women, had immense prestige for titles such as “Je tu il elle” and “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”.
Born on June 6, 1950 in the capital of her country, in the bosom of a Jewish family, Chantal Akerman was the daughter of a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
When she was 15 years old, she was impressed with Jean-Luc Godard ‘s film Pierrot, the Fool , to the point that she decided to start shooting her own films. At 18, she began studying film at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion. But she left the center to run her own savings with her own De ella Saute ma ville , a 13-minute short film about a young woman and her conflictive relationship with everyday reality.
He then moved to New York, where he was seduced by the cinema of avant-garde authors such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol . After finishing Hotel Monterrey there, Chantal Akerman returns to Belgium, where she films Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , about a woman forced to prostitute herself to care for her child.
After beginning the 1990s with Night and Day (1991), about the love triangle formed by two men and a woman, she has remained very active since then with titles such as La mundanza (1992), Contra el olvido (1992), Retrato de A Young Woman in the Late Sixties in Brussels (1993), Romance in New York (1996), The Captive (2000) and Almayer’s Folly (2011) .
In August 2015, two months before his death, he had presented his last work at the Locarno No Home Movie festival.