The exhibition ‘Chantal Akerman: Travelling’, accompanied by a small film series at the Portuguese Cinematheque, explores various stages of the filmmaker’s career and revisits the years and places she experienced and captured on film, utilizing diverse media such as cinema, television, writing, and installation, according to the CCB’s presentation of the show.
This major retrospective dedicated to Chantal Akerman arrives in Lisbon after being presented in Brussels and Paris, marking the tenth anniversary of the filmmaker’s death in 2015 at the age of 65, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of her film ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ at the Cannes Film Festival, which was named the greatest film of all time by the British magazine Sight & Sound in 2022.
The exhibition outlines an artistic and biographical map of the multifaceted Belgian artist, “showcasing images of her productions and previously unseen archival documents,” compiled by the Chantal Akerman Foundation.
The exhibition will be on display at the Contemporary Art Museum/CCB until September 7, accompanied by a series of initiatives, including a guided visit by director Marta Mateus and a reading of the text ‘A Family in Brussels’ by Chantal Akerman, performed by actress Beatriz Batarda on May 17, coinciding with International Museum Day.
The Portuguese Cinematheque, which dedicated a retrospective to the filmmaker in 2012, will partner with the exhibition by hosting a short film cycle from May 24 to 30, featuring the presence of Director of Photography Sabine Lancelin.
‘News from Home’ (1976), featuring letters between Chantal and her mother during the director’s stay in the United States, and ‘Jeanne Dielman’ (1975), starring Delphine Seyrig and considered Chantal Akerman’s major work and an example of feminist cinema, are two of the films that will be screened at the Cinematheque.
Chantal Akerman passed away in Paris in October 2015, leaving behind work described as “incandescent, pioneering, and nomadic,” as the French newspaper Le Monde wrote at the time.
In 2012, when dedicating a retrospective to her in collaboration with the DocLisboa festival, the Cinematheque noted that Chantal Akerman shared “the spirit of a post-Nouvelle Vague generation” and that her works reveal “narrative experimentation, a formal inventiveness, and a rigor in the documentary observation of reality, making them unique objects distinguished by the complex relationship they maintain with everything they film.”
Two years after Chantal Akerman’s death, a foundation was established to preserve her archives and manage the rights to her work, including the restoration of films, retrospectives, the publication of works, and exhibitions.
