- published: 06 Jun 2011
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Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, artist and professor of film at the City College of New York. Her best-known film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). 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. Her mother Natalia (Nelly) had survived Auschwitz, where her own parents had died. At 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 film Saute ma ville, subsidizing the film's costs by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.
Akerman claimed that, at the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), she decided, that same night, to make movies. In 1971, Akerman's first film Saute ma ville premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival. That year, she moved to New York City, where she remained until 1972.