All About Chantal March 10–20, 2016

Istanbul Modern Cinema, in collaboration with Filmmor Women’s Film Festival, presents the most comprehensive retrospective ever organized in Turkey on Belgian director Chantal Akerman, a pioneer of experimental and feminist cinema who passed away on October 5, 2015.

Identifying herself as a “Jewish girl born in Brussels”, Chantal shot her debut film Sauta Ma Ville at the age of 18. In her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, she portrayed how cooking and murder can be equally terrifying in the ordinary domestic life of a woman and that the “personal” can be “political”. Despite the fact that she rejected being categorized under a certain genre as a director, she played a central role in “women’s cinema” and was one of the directors who changed the course of the history of cinema with the new perspectives she brought to cinematic form and narrative. She made over 40 films. She traveled from New York to Israel and from South America to post-communist Eastern Europe. She expressed genocide, placelessness and being displaced on the back of the lost connections in her life by trailing her roots; in her own words, she spoke of what her mother couldn’t. In both fiction and documentary she opted to not voice great ideas by straying her works from literal narratives and statements. Noted time after time as a major influence by directors such as Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Gus Van Sant and Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman’s last film, No Home Movie had its world premiere at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival. The program comprising 16 films includes the touching documentary about her relationship with her mother, her film La Captive (2010) loosely based on Proust’s La Prisonnièreas well as her last fiction film, La Folie Almayer adapted from Joseph Conrad’s debut novel and filmed in Cambodia. The documentary titled, Chantal Akerman: From Here (2010) and in which she talks about her own art will also be screened alongside the director’s filmography.