A widowed mother and her teenage son live a monotonous, tightly controlled existence in a small Brussels apartment. Her days are consumed by household chores and occasional sex work, which provides just enough to keep them afloat. Every action follows a strict, unchanging routine, until a small disruption sets off a slow, inevitable unraveling. A landmark in film history, Chantal Akerman’s modernist masterpiece blends experimental cinema with neorealist drama and was recently crowned the Greatest Film of All Time by critics in the 2022 BFI Sight & Sound decennial poll.

Reviews

‘The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film’s weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering.’
★★★★★
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

‘Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.’
★★★★★
Scott Tobias, The AV Club