A Nos Amours Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle

A Nos Amours is delighted to be working with cinemas across the UK to bring Chantal Akerman’s celebrated debut feature Je tu il elle to new life, including at CCA.

Aged only 18, Akerman travelled to the US after giving up on film school in Belgium. In New York she encountered Warhol, Snow and Mekas. She then made films that put her on the map, revealing an astonishing talent – taking the best of New York experimentation and blending it with an acute European feel for narrative, introspection and intensity of feeling. In her earliest film work we see Akerman's eye at work registering the transient, studying spaces that frame lived life – catching the feel and mood of hotels, rented rooms, urban back streets – and the people who move, drift and exist within these confines.

Je tu il elle (1974) was Akerman’s first feature-length film. Daringly, coolly reminiscent of the films of Andy Warhol, her narrative takes time to register. She is in frame throughout - weaving a filmic weft that surprises and compels. The scene of this woman, naked and alone, compulsively eating sugar, is remarkable for its intensity, as is the footage of her arranging and rearranging the meagre furniture in her apartment. The woman hitch-hikes, and rewards the truck driver with a sexual favour. Other notorious adventures follow.

This initiative is supported by the BFI and Wallonie-Bruxelles International.

Part of a simultaneous screening across 22 cinemas in the UK.