Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), the widowed mother of a teenage son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), ekes out a drab, repetitive existence in her tiny Brussels apartment. Jeanne's days are divided between humdrum domestic chores -- shopping, cooking, housework -- and her job as an occasional prostitute, which keeps her financially afloat. She seems perfectly resigned to her situation until a series of slight interruptions in her routine leads to unexpected and dramatic changes.

Akerman’s ambiguous triptych was based on her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels. A woman (played by the filmmaker) holes up in a room, obsessively eating sugar and rearranging furniture. Then we follow her hunt for love and connection – first with a truck driver, then an ex-lover. With its uninterrupted erotic-free ten-minute lesbian sex scene, this is one of the most radical and assured sequences in any feature debut from the 1970s.

Chantal Akerman’s epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother.

In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, an accomplished filmmaker makes her way through a series of Western European cities to promote her newest release... passing through a succession of exquisitely shot brief encounters, meeting a succession of equally lost souls, which gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. This semi-autobiographical film was a major step forward for the itinerant Akerman, mirroring her own, often turbulent, wanderings.

You can almost smell the hairspray in Akerman’s exuberant but subversive musical about the many romantic entanglements of salon workers in a shopping mall basement. Its natty 1980s style, witty song lyrics, rapturous dance sequences, not to mention a gloriously bitchy male-suited quartet, deliver all the joys of the genre. At the same time, Akerman critiques the consumerist ‘paradise’ around them, questioning whether love, if it’s tied to conformity, really is the answer.

‘That’s a story for me,’ said Akerman of Marcel Proust’s The Prisoner, when she remembered ‘there was that apartment, and the corridor, and the two characters’. This languorous, beguiling adaptation – where, again, Akerman resets our sense of time – probes possessive love. A wealthy young man obsesses over his girlfriend. But who is the captor asks Akerman, who considered a person could be a cage as much as a room.