Acting
Chantal Akerman meets with elderly Jewish women in Paris, all of them survivors of the Shoah, and listens to their family stories. Between interviews, Akerman's mother Natalia speaks of her own family. Made for a French miniseries on grandmothers.
Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.
In this 2007 interview, an off-camera Chantal Akerman interviews her mother about her films. The producers of the interview originally intended to edit out Akerman’s questions but ultimately decided to keep them in to preserve the candor of the mother-daughter rapport.
A 3rd short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman in Knokke to be used to be accepted at INSAS starring her friends her mother and herself.
Akerman films her mother Natalia, an elderly woman of Polish origin, in her Brussels apartment. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. Also, and to show how small the world has become, Chantal remains in contact with her mother at other times of the year via Skype from lands as far away from Belgium as Oklahoma or New York.
What a revelation and a privilege it is to see Chantal Akerman at work. Its French title a pun, this film offers behind-the-scenes footage from the production of Tomorrow We Move: makeup and costume tests, script readings, scene blocking and rehearsals, and on-set interviews with Aurore Clément and Sylvie Testud, her lead actresses, as well as Akerman herself.
The beginnings of Chantal Akerman behind the camera at the ages of 17 and 18: four films shot in Super 8 during the summer, presented to enter the National Higher Institute of Performing Arts and Broadcasting Techniques (INSAS, Brussels) in September 1967, where she was accepted.
