Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics’ poll, Chantal Akerman’s chamber epic is a key entry in her prolific body of work.

Jeanne Dielman is revolutionary in its bold experimental approach to narrative subject and structure. Charting the breakdown of its protagonist, a bourgeois Belgian housewife, mother and part-time sex worker over the course of three days, the film rigorously records her everyday life in extended time and hypnotic detail.

This film was made with a mostly female crew that transformed European art cinema’s most glamorous star, Delphine Seyrig, into a seemingly unremarkable single mother.

To watch Jeanne Dielman is to submit to Akerman’s unrelenting gaze and to be trapped with Jeanne: ‘to have the physical experience of time unfolding inside you, of time entering you’.

“One of the seminal films of the 1970s” Slant Magazine

This May, QFT celebrates one of cinema's mavericks with a season dedicated to filmmaker Chantal Akerman, the first female director to take the number one spot on Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time poll.