“[N]ever before was the materiality of woman’s time in the home rendered so viscerally … [Chantal Akerman] invents a new language capable of transmitting truths previously unspoken” -B. Ruby Rich

Recently voted the greatest film of all time in the prestigious Sight & Sound critics poll

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

This film is screening as part of Arkadin’s March-long spotlight on great films by female directors.