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Blow Up My Town
Saute ma ville
A young woman, played by the filmmaker herself, enters her Brussels flat and begins a domestic routine that gradually degenerates. Parodying the mundane, she mops the floor, polishes her shoes, tapes up the door’s crevices, thereby giving an explosive twist to her domestic life.
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who passed away in 2015, has gained worldwide fame. Nothing is quiet about her first short film, Blow Up My Town (1968). Her character is abrupt, energetic, and explosive. Something is teetering. This short film is a visionary prelude to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and life.
Bio Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a Belgian filmmaker, artist, and writer born in Brussels. At the age of 15, she discovered Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), which inspired her to take up filmmaking. She almost immediately left the Brussels film school (INSAS), rejecting its rigid framework. The following year, she made her debut short film, Saute ma ville (1968), the first expression of a free and radical cinema. Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she discovered the experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow, which had a profound influence on the films she made there, such as La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monterey (1972).
Credits
Script
Cast
Camera
René Fruchter
Editor
Geneviève Luciani
Producer
204
- This film was #12 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025