A young film director is making a movie with his friend Christa. In the film-within-the-film there are two couples, one real, one imagined, and the film — told through five dreams — is as much the story of a film in-production, as the birth of a child.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"

Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

Akerman films her mother Natalia, an elderly woman of Polish origin, in her Brussels apartment. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. Also, and to show how small the world has become, Chantal remains in contact with her mother at other times of the year via Skype from lands as far away from Belgium as Oklahoma or New York.

A young mother, alone with her daughter, confides in a friend who happens to be the director herself. Chantal Akerman, although she sympathizes with the mother, does not say a word.

I Don’t Belong Anywhere - Le Cinéma de Chantal Akerman, explores some of the Belgian filmmaker’s 40 plus films. From Brussels to Tel-Aviv, from Paris to New-York, this documentary charts the sites of her peregrinations. An experimental filmmaker, a nomad, Chantal Akerman shares her cinematic trajectory, one that has never ceased to interrogate the the meaning of her existence. Thanks in great part to the interventions of her editor, Claire Atherton, she delineates the origins of her film language and her aesthetic stance.

Chantal Akerman a réalisé ce documentaire dans le cadre d'une série thématique de téléfilms sur les grand-mères. En écho à la voix de sa propre mère qui lui raconte ses relations avec sa mère et sa grand-mère, la cinéaste rend visite à trois femmes âgées d'origine juive et leur demande de parler de leurs aïeules. Assises dans leurs salons, filmées en plans fixes, ces grand-mères racontent leurs souvenirs, la vie des communautés juives avant la guerre, puis l'Holocauste, et les efforts pour survivre à l'horreur. Tout un monde, disparu dans les camps de concentration renaît au fil de leurs paroles. Face aux récits de ces vieilles femmes rappelant un passé que l'éloignement rend quasi mythique, Chantal Akerman a su effacer la mise en scène, comme Jean Eustache dans son Numéro zéro, pour laisser toute la place à la parole et à sa puissance évocatrice. Dis-moi was commissioned for television – part of a series about grandmothers (Grands-mères, un série proposée par Jean Frapat). Akerman chose to talk with several elderly Jewish women – all of them survivors of the Shoah. Akerman has a terrible family history of her own – 'My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. In 1942 she was taken to Auschwitz, just 30 miles from where she grew up…Her parents died there and most of her family' (from an interview in the Jewish Chronicle). Akerman’s mother Natalia, a teenager at the time, survived, a quite unimaginable orphaning.

A sensitivity to sounds coming from the activities of an unwelcome guest in the close quarters of an apartment is only one important component in this atmospheric, avant-garde drollery by Chantal Akerman. When the apartment owner comes home, her guest is settled in and at first, the slightly reclusive host decides simply to eat her breakfast in her room instead of having to face morning conversation with her guest. Sounds of the toilet flushing, the bath water running and splashing, footsteps pacing, and furniture moving invade the hostess' refuge in her bedroom like the frontrunners of an all-out offensive. She locks herself up for 28 days, life's detritus accumulating around her, just so she does not have to go out to face the nemesis that lurks beyond her door.

1968 film by Chantal AkermanA young girl shuts herself away in her apartment and goes about her business in a strange way, as she wastes the night in the kitchen – humming all along.

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 reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

1976 film by Chantal Akerman

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

A lonely young widow lives with her son following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon.