Belgian - Director | June 6, 1950 - October 5, 2015
Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother.
Chantal Akerman
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When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.
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I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.
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I realized that my mother was at the center of my work, because now that my mother is no longer there, there's nobody left.
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I was not interested by cinema when I was young.
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My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.
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I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.
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I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.
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I am a woman, and I am Jewish; I'm a film-maker, and I'm a writer, so you cannot just put me in one box.
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My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.
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My mother was totally different from the mothers of my friends. She would never separate from me. In a way, my life belongs to her. When I was a child, she complained that I was anorexic, so they sent me to places to get me to eat. When I look at pictures of myself, I was just a normal-looking child. It was her fantasy.
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I am from a woman's family. My great-grandmother had three daughters and a son. My grandmother had two daughters, and my mother had two daughters. My sister had a daughter and then finally a son. You should have seen my father with the son. He could not believe that finally there was a boy in the family.
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