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BFI Distribution has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to the film catalogue of late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

The collection of 20 fiction and documentary features and short films was acquired from the Fondation Chantal Akerman, in partnership with the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.

BFI Distribution will give a theatrical re-release in 2025 to Akerman’s 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as part of a package of Akerman films.

The package is part of a wider BFI project in 2025 to celebrate Akerman, including a retrospective season at London’s BFI Southbank, BFI Blu-ray releases and titles on BFI Player.

The Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program has always done things a little differently than the rest of the vaunted film festival, and this year will be no different. The independent section is preparing to give out the first audience award in the history of the festival. Even better? It’s designed to honor beloved Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

Launched in 1969 and held alongside the Cannes Film Festival each year, Directors’ Fortnight has consistently been one of the more audience-friendly elements of Cannes, and has always been open to the public. As part of its 2024 edition, those audience will now get to vote on the just-announced People’s Choice Award, which is being supported by the Fondation Chantal Akerman and will award the filmmaker of the winning feature €7,500, which will be presented at the closing ceremony.

Each year, “in addition to professionals and other accredited guests, the Fortnight opens its doors to...

Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section will launch a new audience award at this year’s festival, named in honor of the late Belgian director Chantal Akerman. It marks the first time in the history of Cannes that the audience will choose a festival winner.

Professionals and industry attendees, as well as ordinary moviegoers at the Cannes sidebar, will vote on the Directors’ Fortnight winner. The winning film will receive €7,500 ($8,100) in prize money from the Chantal Akerman Foundation and will be announced at the section’s closing ceremony.

Akerman chose Fortnight to premiere her 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce – 1080 Brussels, a feminist drama that topped the most recent Sight and Sound poll by filmmakers and critics as the greatest movie of all time.

Throughout the years, Akerman remained loyal to Fortnight, screening such films as Golden Eighties (1986), Sud (1999), La Captive (2000) and Tombée de Nuit sur Shanghaï (2007) in the Cannes section.

Directors’ Fortnight, the independent selection running alongside the Cannes Film Festival, has created a People’s Choice Award which will be voted on by audiences.

The prize is endowed by the Fondation Chantal Akerman and will be awarding the filmmaker of the winning feature a grant of €7,500 which will be presented at the closing ceremony.

Directors’ Fortnight organizers stated the new award will pay tribute to Chantal Akerman, “whose pioneering, eclectic and fiercely independent vision might serve as a compass for this new People’s Choice.”

Directors’ Fortnight said it “(shares) a long history” with Chantal Akerman dating back to 1975, when she presented there her film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce – 1080 Brussels.” Directors’ Fortnight went to premiere Akerman’s films, including Golden Eighties (1986), Sud (1999), La Captive (2000) and Tombée de Nuit sur Shanghaï (2007).

The sidebar said People’s Choice will celebrate a film that will be an “affirmation of a unique...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.Newsa Different Man.IATSE, Teamsters, and the Hollywood Basic Crafts unions began bargaining jointly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after a thousands-strong rally in Los Angeles. In Variety, IATSE president Matthew Loeb discusses the union’s priorities and the threat of another strike after the current contract expires on July 31.In an open letter, Carlo Chatrian, the outgoing artistic director of the Berlinale, and Mark Peranson, the festival’s head of programming, respond to the backlash that followed the closing ceremony, at which a number of award recipients called for a ceasefire in Gaza: “This year’s festival was a place for dialogue and exchange for ten days; yet once the films stopped rolling, another form of communication...

Filmmaker is pleased to premiere the trailer for Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” series, a complete retrospective of the Thai filmmaker’s career so far. The series will run from May 4-14 in New York City and feature seven feature films, four short film programs and Weerasethakul in attendance for select screenings. The filmmaker also programmed several films to screen alongside his own, including Chantal Ackerman’s La Captive, Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Guy Maddin’s Careful, Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework and Frederick Wiseman’s Primate (presented in 16mm), among others. Several of the filmmaker’s […]

The post Exclusive Trailer: Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker is pleased to premiere the trailer for Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” series, a complete retrospective of the Thai filmmaker’s career so far. The series will run from May 4-14 in New York City and feature seven feature films, four short film programs and Weerasethakul in attendance for select screenings. The filmmaker also programmed several films to screen alongside his own, including Chantal Ackerman’s La Captive, Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, Guy Maddin’s Careful, Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework and Frederick Wiseman’s Primate (presented in 16mm), among others. Several of the filmmaker’s […]

The post Exclusive Trailer: Film at Lincoln Center’s “The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul” Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There have been a lot of lists about the best films of the 21st century. IndieWire has been digging through the last two decades one genre at a time; meanwhile, the New York Times’ top movie critics provided their own takes. J. Hoberman, the longtime Village Voice film critic who now works as a freelancer, decided to join the fray. Here’s his take, also available at his site, and republished here with permission.

People have been asking me, so I thought I might as well join (or crash) the party initiated by the New York Times and put in my two cents regarding the 25 Best Films of the 21st Century (so far). I don’t see “everything” anymore and I haven’t been to Cannes since 2011.

There is some overlap but this is not the same as the proposed 21-film syllabus of 21st Century cinema included in my book “Film After Film.” Those were all in their way pedagogical choices. Begging the question of what “best” means, these are all movies that I really like, that I’m happy to see multiple times, that are strongly of their moment and that I think will stand the test of time.

My single “best” film-object is followed by a list of 11 filmmakers and one academic production company (in order of “best-ness”) responsible for two or more “best films,” these followed by another eight individual movies (again in order) and finally four more tentatively advanced films (these alphabetical). I’m sure I’m forgetting some but that’s the nature of the beast.

Christian Marclay: “The Clock”

Lars von Trier: “Dogville” & “Melancholia” (and none of his others)

Hou Hsiao Hsien: “The Assassin” & “Flight of the Red Balloon”

Jean-Luc Godard: “In Praise of Love” & “Goodbye to Language”

David Cronenberg: “Spider,” “A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises,” & “A Dangerous Method”

David Lynch: “Mulholland Drive” & “Inland Empire”

Ken Jacobs: “Seeking the Monkey King,” “The Guests” (and more)

Cristi Puiu: “The Death of Mr Lazarescu” & “Aurora”

Chantal Akerman: “No Home Movie” & “La Captive” (assuming that 2000 is part of the 21st Century)

Paul Thomas Anderson: “The Master” & “There Will Be Blood”

Kathryn Bigelow: “The Hurt Locker” & “Zero Dark Thirty”

Alfonso Cuarón: “Gravity” & “Children of Men”

Sensory Ethnology Lab: “Leviathan,” “Manakamana,” & “People’s Park”

“The Strange Case of Angelica” — Manoel de Oliviera

“Corpus Callosum” — Michael Snow

“West of the Tracks” — Wang Bing

“Carlos” — Olivier Assayas

“Che” — Steven Soderbergh

“Ten” — Abbas Kariostami

“Russian Ark” — Aleksandr Sokurov

“The World” — Jia Zhangke

“Citizenfour” — Laura Poitras

“Day Night Day Night” — Julia Loktev

“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” — Nuri Bilge Ceylan

“Wall-e” — Andrew Stanton

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The twenty first entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing Chantal Akerman's Tomorrow We Move (2004) from March 8 - April 7, 2017 in most countries around the world. Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. A recent, ambiguous “tribute” to the director in Cineaste magazine dismissed most of her work in fiction filmmaking beyond the 1970s, and was especially down on those fictions involving music, comedy, love, passion, and obsession. So, into the bin go Night and Day (unmentioned in the article), Golden Eighties (“dated and silly”), La Captive (“elephantine, imitative, and strangely fake”), and Almayer’s Folly (sunk by that “terrible French actor Stanislas Merhar”). And Tomorrow we Move? It and A Couch in New York (1996) are merely “exercises that Akerman had to get out of her system.”There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in Akerman’s work,...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question:

Last Friday saw the release of Garth Davis’ “Lion,” the musical score for which is the gorgeous result of a collaboration between two giants of the neo-classical movement, Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka. It’s just the latest indication that we’re living in a fascinating, vibrant time for movie music, and December boasts a number of films that will only add more fuel to that fire. With that in mind, we asked our panel of critics to name their favorite film score of the 21st Century.

Tasha Robinson (@TashaRobinson), The Verge

There are some really striking contenders out there, topped by Susumu Hirasawa’s manic,...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

“Fassbinder’s Top 10” offers Salò on Friday, Walsh‘s The Naked and the Dead & Visconti‘s The Damned on Saturday, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Sunday. All are on 35mm.

Roman Polanski‘s Frantic shows this Sunday, as does Ashes and Embers.

Spirited Away and The Cat Returns play as part of “Studio Ghibli Weekends.

From Catherine Grant comes word that Libération is reporting that Chantal Akerman has passed away at the age of 65. Akerman, who made an indelible mark on cinema with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), followed up with such significant works as News from Home (1977), Golden Eighties (1986), From the East (1983) and La Captive (2000). Her most recent film, No Home Movie, premiered in Locarno and will screen tomorrow and Thursday at the New York Film Festival. We're collecting tributes and remembrances. » - David Hudson...

From Catherine Grant comes word that Libération is reporting that Chantal Akerman has passed away at the age of 65. Akerman, who made an indelible mark on cinema with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), followed up with such significant works as News from Home (1977), Golden Eighties (1986), From the East (1983) and La Captive (2000). Her most recent film, No Home Movie, premiered in Locarno and will screen tomorrow and Thursday at the New York Film Festival. We're collecting tributes and remembrances. » - David Hudson...

Single tickets for films showing at Tiff officially go on sale tomorrow and before you consider paying for an overpriced, over-hyped, red carpet Gala screening of a film that will be out in theatres week later, we suggest you mix it up a bit and consider the alternative. Joined by our own Toronto based critic Blake Williams (who is also presenting his latest short entitled Coorow-Latham Road in Wavelengths 4 this year), we've complied a 25-list of invigorating films from pioneering master filmmakers who still don't get enough cred to visionaries making their first contributions to cinema. We begin the countdown with..:  #1. Almayers Folly Director: Chantal Akerman Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Marc Barbé, Aurora Marion, Zac Andrianasolo Distributor: Rights Available Buzz: Akerman is at once a key figure in structural filmmaking, 60's & 70's world cinema, and women's filmmaking in general. Producing some of the most contemplative and soaring masterpieces of the last few decades (Jeanne Dielman,...

"One of the finest literary adaptations ever made, Chantal Akerman's La Captive (2000) distills La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of Marcel Proust's sprawling In Search of Lost Time, to a spare, inventive rumination on the author's key themes: jealousy and possession." Melissa Anderson for Artforum: "Akerman, who co-wrote La Captive with Eric de Kuyper, dispenses with the novel's belle epoque time frame, setting her film in present-day Paris. Marcel and Albertine, Proust's mismatched lovers, become Simon (Stanislas Merhar) and Ariane (Sylvie Testud), who live together in Simon's enormous apartment. A neurasthenic writer, Simon is feverishly jealous, first seen studying Super 8 footage of Ariane playing on the beach with a group of women — a time he refers to as her 'other life,' when her romantic relationships were exclusively same-sex."...