A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal’s personality. Forty years of friendship condensed into four minutes…

biografia

Manhattan, New York, was where I happened to be born. After 6 months of stress, I boarded the first plane to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my parents and sister. My primary and secondary school was not too far from Copacabana Beach. The university years were spent in Paris, suffering at the Institut de Psychologie. To make life less tedious, I saw films in art movie houses rather than attending classes at the Sorbonne. After my B.A. in Psychology I enrolled in Film Studies at Paris 3-Sorbonne, at the Institut d’Art et Archeologie (Eric Rohmer’s classes) and at the Cinemathèque Française (Henri Langlois’ classes). In the early 1970s I travelled throughout Europe with a friend in a rundown Renault pick-up, organizing women’s film festivals and distributing films made by women. Our distribution company was called Cine-Femmes International. My debut as an experimental filmmaker came in 1980, when I co-directed CAROLYN 2 with Martine Rousset (starring choreographer/dancer Carolyn Carlson). It was a cinema and slide installation. Many films came afterwards, mostly shot in super-8 then blown-up to 16mm. Today I shoot mainly on video but still use super-8 whenever possible.
These films have been shown in festivals worldwide (Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Tribeca, Viennale and others), in cinematheques and in art fairs such as the São Paulo Biennale and Arco, Madrid.

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