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    Restored in 2023 by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK) and the Chantal Akerman Foundation, with the support of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and the European Union - NextGeneration EU. Under the supervision of the director of photography, Babette Mangolte. 

    The Room

    La Chambre
    Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1972, 11’

    Panning shots in a repeating full-circle movement show a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. When the camera first passes the bedroom, there is no one there, but each time it returns to the frame, filmmaker Chantal Akerman herself is sitting on the bed, motionless at first, then busy with an apple.  When she is last seen, she yawns.

    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). 

    The problematic relation between a woman’s daily routine and her creative everyday is dramatically highlighted through the flight into a secluded room–in which the stakes of her art will be proven. It is in this room, apart, that Akerman performs rituals of order and disorder, as if conducting a continuous aesthetic experiment. This room is especially charged with an obsessive quality that points to a central problematic in her films: the autonomous person.

    Ivone Margulies
    © La Chambre (Chantal Akerman, 1972)
    La Chambre (Chantal Akerman, 1972)
    article
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    A Room of Her Own

    Chantal Akerman’s La Chambre

    Öykü Sofuoğlu
    17.11.2024

    Lounging on a small bed, Chantal Akerman’s posture seems casual and relaxed at first glance, but the repetitive tilts of her head—to the left and then back to center—contrasting with the smooth glide of the camera suggest otherwise. Restlessness is in the air, yet before we can discern it, the image is already on the move, retracing its steps for a second time.

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    Credits

    Script
    Chantal Akerman
    Cast
    Chantal Akerman
    Camera
    Babette Mangolte
    Editor
    Chantal Akerman
    Sound
    Geneviève Luciani
    331
    • This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025
      voted by Gerard-Jan Claes, Lauma Kaudzite, Flavia Dima, Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal, Laura Staab, Naomi Pacifique
    experimental avant-garde structuralism

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    Loveboard

    Felipe Casanova, Belgium, Switzerland, 2023, 17’

    A broken phone and the digital memory of a broken queer relationship. Through the careful manipulation of discarnate metal components and the filmmaker’s attentive look at an intimate archive, a fading first love surfaces. Loveboard is a playful reflection on what remains.

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    Yarokamena

    Andrés Jurado, Colombia, Portugal, 2022, 21’

    In 20th-century Colombia, resistance fighter Yarokamena, a member of the indigenous Uitoto tribe, called for rebellion against violent exploitation of the rubber mining industry in the Amazone and invoked the spiritual powers of war.

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    Language of the Entrails

    Luciana Decker Orozco, Bolivia, USA, 2025, 12’

    A journey to the underworld begins within our own entrails. This film explores the intimate rhythm of digestion only to next investigate the becoming of geological eras, inspired by Gamaliel Churata’s El Pez de Oro, in which he states, “we all carry the dead alive; that the dead live.”

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    Un Chien Andalou

    Luis Buñuel, France, 1929, 21’

    Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams. Don’t get stuck on the plot. Buñuel deliberately omits chronology and opts for Freudian dream logic, in which scenes do not necessarily follow one another logically.

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    Swollen Stigma

    Sarah Pucill, United Kingdom, 1998, 21’

    Swollen Stigma is a visual, surrealistic narrative about a woman travelling both literally and psychically through several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman, fill her imagination. The film proposes lesbian imagery, and its shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces, and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external.

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    The White Elephant

    Shuruq Harb, Palestine, 2018, 12’

    Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada, and trance music gatherings, Shuruq Harb paints the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s. In the midst of Israeli pop culture and the political climate of the Oslo Accords, she comes to grips with her anxiety.

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    Snow Edge

    Juan Francisco Rodríguez, Colombia, 2021, 15’

    The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.

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    Old Child

    Elettra Bisogno, Hazem Alqaddi, Belgium, Palestine, 2019, 16’

    Old Child depicts the fragmented story of Hazem, who had to flee Gaza. Throughout this stream-of-consciousness montage of dreams and reminiscences, he searches for order but also for the beauty he left behind.

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