“Jeanne Dielman” is regarded as a landmark of 1970s feminist and experimental cinema and marked Chantal Akerman’s international breakthrough. The film follows the strictly ritualised daily routine of a widowed woman in Brussels, who lives with her son, over the course of three days: she makes the beds, cleans, cooks, peels potatoes, runs errands and receives a man each afternoon in exchange for payment. In long, static shots, Akerman deliberately eschews classical dramaturgy and, through the repetition of domestic and reproductive labour, makes visible what usually remains invisible to society. Jeanne Dielman appears to be doing the same thing over and over, yet it is precisely the smallest deviations that create enormous tension: on the second day, the order begins to falter; on the third, it escalates. Jeanne remains silent for almost the entire film; all the more eloquent, then, are her precise, yet rigid and fragile movements. The flat feels like a factory, a stage and a prison all at once. Despite – or perhaps precisely because of – its formal radicalism, the film is today regarded as one of the most significant in film history.  

“*Jeanne Dielman* is a monolithic work in every sense of the word, one that has left a lasting mark on the history of cinema, and a unique viewing experience that has lost none of its intensity even 50 years on.” (Florian Widegger) 

„[…] eines jener Feuerschiffe der Kinomoderne, zu denen man immer wieder zurückkehrt, die einem den Weg weisen, wenn man sich verloren fühlt im Strudel der Bilder und Töne.“ (Österreichisches Filmmuseum) 

“In a film that, agonizingly, depicts women’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force … There was a before and an after Jeanne Dielman, just as there had once been a before and after Citizen Kane.” (Amy Taubin, Sight and Sound) 

In cooperation with the Filmmuseum and hdgo