Chantal Anne Akerman born on June 6 1950 – 5 October 2015, she was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was dubbed a "masterpiece" by The New York Times. According to film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Akerman's influence on feminist filmmaking and avant-garde cinema has been substantial. Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Holocaust survivors from Poland. She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. Her mother, Natalia (Nelly), had survived years at Auschwitz, where her own parents were murdered. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and she encouraged her daughter to pursue a career rather than marry young. At age 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. Akerman dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville; she funded the film's costs by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, captured in some of her films. In News from Home (1976), Akerman's mother's letters outlining mundane family activities serve as a soundtrack throughout the film. The 2015 film No Home Movie centers on mother-daughter relationships, largely situated in the kitchen, and is a response to her mother's death. Akerman acknowledged that her mother was at the center of her work and admitted to feeling directionless after her death. The maternal imagery can be found throughout all of Akerman's films as an homage and an attempt to reconstitute the image and voice of the mother. In Family in Brussels, Akerman narrates the story, interchanging her own voice with her mother's. Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity. The kitchens in Akerman's work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation and serve the function of a backdrop to the dramas of daily life. The kitchens, alongside other domestic spaces, act as self-confining prisons under patriarchal conditions. In Akerman's work, the kitchen acts as a domestic theatre. Although Akerman is often grouped within feminist and queer thinking, the filmmaker has articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. Akerman resists labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter; Akerman has stated that she sees film as a "generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity". The filmmaker has advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining that "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves". The filmmaker asserted that there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals. Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman's most well-known film, the main protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality. Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances. Akerman engages with realist representations, a form which is historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman".

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