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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold
J’ai faim, j’ai froid
Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home to Paris.
The rushed adolescents speak fleetingly, as if there is no time to waste. Their recklessness is reminiscent of Akerman's own demeanour in her very first short film Blow Up My Town (1968), in which she turns the domestic household tasks, traditionally assigned to women, upside down. In I’m Hungry, I’m Cold, Akerman depicts young women who seem to be cut from the same cloth: hungry, playful, with a sense of rebellion.
I’m Hungry, I’m Cold is part of the anthology film Paris vu par... vingt ans après, in which filmmakers Philippe Garrel, Frédéric Mitterrand and Vincent Nordon also canned a short vignette around Parisian 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).