Recently declared the greatest film of all time, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a singular work in film history.

The film meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick.

In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck
Director: Chantal Akerman
Writer: Chantal Akerman
Length: 202 minutes
Not Rated
(1975)

About Akerman
Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels, and died in Paris in 2015. Akerman was a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking. Born to Holocaust survivors from Poland, the generational trauma of this experience was a continuing theme in her work and in recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity. She made over 40 films during her life time, and is considerd to be one of the most important European directors of her generation.