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Opening in cinemas across the UK on 7 February 2025 as part of the BFI’s major Chantal Akerman BFI Southbank season 'Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception' running throughout February and March 2025.
The greatest film of all time and the greatest film about time. Heralded by Le Monde in January 1976 as “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema”, Chantal Akerman’s landmark second feature, the mesmerising Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles follows the meticulous daily routine of its titular lead over the course of three days. Presented at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1975, the film brought the then 24-year-old Akerman international recognition. A cornerstone of feminist cinema, Chantal Akerman’s cinematically radical film challenged the status quo when it was originally released and continues to do so today.
Voted Sight and Sound’s Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 Critics’ poll (the first time a female filmmaker has taken the number one spot since the poll’s inception in 1952), Jeanne Dielman is consciously feminist in its bold experimental approach to narrative subject and structure. Charting the breakdown of its protagonist, a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute over the course of three days, the film rigorously records her everyday life in extended time and from a fixed camera position. Watching the repetitive monotony of domestic chores through static long takes, the viewer notices every hypnotic detail, forced to experience the passage of time in real time. The viewer becomes attuned to Jeanne’s practised rhythms so that when her routine starts to unravel we watch riveted.