Movies: Paradise Films

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....

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

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 ...

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

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...

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...

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....

Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment....

A tale of an occidental merchant, Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice....

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...

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....

Chantal Akerman investigates the American Deep South through the story of a lynching and grisly murder of an African-American man that took place in Texas in 1998....

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...

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...

Akerman spends a brief period on her own in an apartment by the sea in Tel Aviv. She films from the apartment and in her narration she talks about her family, her Jewish identity and her childhood. She wonders whether normal everyday life is possibl...

An unfinished Chantal Akerman film about the troubled youths and drug addicts going through rehabilitation in Yonkers. Myra Alfreds, who commissions the film, accompanies Akerman and Mangolte on the film shoot in Yonkers, a city of nearly 200,000 inh...

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...

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...