When I'm a Star

Chantal Akerman was commissioned by Visions to make this short film for £20,000. It was first shown on 21 November 1984, on Channel 4. Akerman herself plays the role of a director visiting Hollywood to find financing from an uncle she hardly knows. Very little goes to plan… Also stars Aurore Clement and Colleen Camp.

A filmmaker’s self-portrait, asking hard questions of herself and of us. Invoking Aurore Clément as a kind of stand-in or proxy, a glamorous counterpart to Akerman who sports a drawn-on moustache. What is cinema for? Who is it for? If the Mosaic prohibition on making graven images includes film images, then where does that leave a Jewish filmmaker?

Chantal Akerman followed famous Choreographer Pina Bausch and her company of dancers, The Tanzteater Wuppertal, for five weeks while they were on tour in Germany, Italy and France. Her objective was to capture Pina Bausch's unparalleled art not only on stage by behind the scenes.

An exploration of Jewish American identity in a multilayered portrait of the immigrant experience. A series of first-person addresses delivered by a cross-section of Jewish New Yorkers, whose by turns tragic and humourous tales speak to a collective history of trauma, displacement, and resilience.

Vincent, a young Swiss, is upset by his meeting with the city of Lisbon. He will meet two persons: a prostitute of high flight and a great writer fallen and suicidal.

A group of gay friends and lovers discuss love, sex, life and death as they exchange partners and try to dodge the bullet of AIDS in the drama Le traité du hasard. Patrick is a gay man whose circle of acquaintances provides the background for this story. They include Lou Rockfeller III, a flamboyant drag queen; Bruno (Bruno Anthony de Trigance), a former college professor who has since found success in the film industry; Daisy, a middle-aged author whose love life is a long litany of disasters; and Julien, a good-looking man who makes his living as a hustler. Julien was involved with Patrick at one time, and it turns out most of Patrick's friends have been with either him or Julien at one time or another -- which becomes a subject of grave concern when Julien develops a full-blown case of AIDS.

The frustrated loves of Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet at the beginning of the 1920s. The death of Radiguet that sank Cocteau into opium. A story under the influence of drugs. A narrative in the spirit of Cocteau. And all this in a musical.