Movies: Paradise Films

Ariane and Simon met down by the water. Simon has managed to prize Ariane away from her friends, a bunch of free and arrogant girls, and move her into his place, with her own room at the end of the hall and her own bathroom next to his. He has taken ...

A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores and takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart....

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman lives in New York. Filmed images of the City accompany texts of Akerman's loving mother back home in Brussels. The City comes more and more to the front while the words of the mother, read by Akerman herself, gradual...

Dr. Henry Harriston is a successful psychoanalyst in New York City. When he is near a nervous breakdown, he arranges to change his flat with Beatrice Saulnier from France for a while. Both don't know each other and both find themselves deeply involve...

A woman suffers a subdued psychological breakdown in the wake of a devastating breakup....

On a trip across Western Europe to promote her newest release, filmmaker Anna encounters several individuals—familiar and otherwise—and attends to their discontents....

Inspired by true events, a 14 year-old boy is accused of raping and murdering a little girl...

Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York....

In this thriller, a UNESCO translator stumbles across a group which is hiding and supporting Nazis and facilitating their travel around the world. She had been given an assignment to study the work of a writer who recently had died, and the conspirac...

A short documentary on the creation of the fresco by Alba Fabre Sacristán paying homage to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Made by Akerman's childhood friend and longtime collaborator Marilyn Watelet and also c...

Scenes of life in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc....

In a remote, isolated Yazidi Kurdish village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo, a widower with a pitiful pension and three worthless sons, travels daily to his wife's grave. There he meets the lovely Nina, who is communing with her late husband. The two a...

Belgian director Chantal Akerman avoids her usual "real time" technique in Histoires d'Amérique. The anecdotal nature of the subject matter compels Akerman to fragment her narrative, rather than offer it in one, uninterrupted continuum. Still, anothe...

A filmmaker’s self-portrait, asking hard questions of herself and of us. Invoking Aurore Clément as a kind of stand-in or proxy, a glamorous counterpart to Akerman who sports a drawn-on moustache. What is cinema for? Who is it for? If the Mosaic proh...

Jack and Julie live in a bare flat in Paris. At night, Jack drives a taxi while Julie wanders around the city, and in the day they make love. One day Julie meets Joseph, the daytime driver of the taxi, and soon Julie is spending her nights with Josep...

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Three young women at a hair salon all like the son of the clothing store proprietors across the mall. Although Robby is selfish and shallow, he's appealing to Lili, the salon's manager, who's trendy and also the salon-owner's moll; to Mado, who's inn...

Following over two dozen different people in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, Akerman examines acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance....

A married biology professor goes back to her ex boyfriend who is still in love with her. When a secret is revealed, she cannot decide between listening to her heart and her mind....

Ana bolts from her wedding altar and flies from Venezuela to Paris to realize her dream of becoming a great opera star....