Black Metal

In this incisive dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet empire, bullet holes from WWII still pockmark the old stone buildings. Akerman journeys from East Germany to Moscow between the late summer and winter of 1993 ('while there’s still time'), chronicling in deliberate tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic tableaux yet another moment of radical upheaval in the 20th-century, the faces and bodies of Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians weighed down with obedient resignation and uncertainty.

Several young men and women arrive one after the other at Hôtel des Acacias, full of hope, desire and vitality. In the bustle of this hotel, everyone is looking for love. Hôtel des Acacias was an exercise guided in 1982 by Chantal Akerman at Belgium’s INSAS audio-visual college.

A family of Polish-Jewish refugees arrives in Brussels in 1947 to navigate the challenges of postwar survival. Guided by a maternal voice-over, the narrative tracks their daily struggles with poverty, housing, and obtaining legal residency permits. Through staged, static tableaus, the film records these everyday bureaucratic and living conditions.

Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.

A death in the family. Patrick dies and his three sisters gather at their parents' home in Normandy. Anne, the oldest, is steady, married with two children, showing little emotion. Isabelle, who's cut herself off from her family for eight years, returns from Paris. Claude, Patrick's twin and still a student, grieves for her other half. Along with their parents, each must face family grievances first before they can grieve together for Patrick. Then comes the revelation of how he died, and new feelings come to the fore. Can a death help a family to heal, coax an aging mother back to sanity, bring a couple into each other's arms, and enable two sisters to grow?

All of the time and effort put forth to stage a musical is chronicled here in this bright and funny French outing. The story is set at a shopping mall where people audition for an upcoming show. Afterwards, they are seen going through the grueling routines of learning the music and rehearsing.

The beginnings of Chantal Akerman behind the camera at the ages of 17 and 18: four films shot in Super 8 during the summer, presented to enter the National Higher Institute of Performing Arts and Broadcasting Techniques (INSAS, Brussels) in September 1967, where she was accepted.

Single woman Charlotte tries to write erotic fiction despite not having any sensual experience.

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.

A 4th short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman with her friends in Brussels, shot in front of the former Hotel van Cleve-Ravenstein coincidentally the place where now CINEMATEK and the archives of the Chantel Akerman Fondation are residing.

The first film by Chantal Akerman, a short silent 8mm film shot during the Brussels summer Midi Fair, that was one of four short films she made as a short of entrance exam at INSAS were she studied for just a couple of months.

Moshe Amar is a once poet and now a "businessman" who left his wife with their new born in Israel twenty years ago and spent them in the land of limitless possibilities trying to leave a mark of immortality but, up to that point, only got the marks that frantic debt collectors are more than happy to give. Tsach is the abandoned son who is now a skilled sniper in the Israeli Army. Tsach resents his father for both abandoning his mother for 21 years and not attending her funeral.

This film deals with the experiences of children in concentration camps. The more so because it discloses, above all, circumstances that have hitherto been almost completely untold, namely the fate of children in the camps under the Japanese occupation during World War II. It's a meeting between two women who, when children, were prisoners in concentration camps. One of them was deported to Auschwitz when she was 13 and remained there for two years; the other was interned in a Japanese camp in Indonesia when she was 11 and stayed there for more than three years. The two women talk, each reliving their experiences through a child's heart and soul.