Chantal Akerman

Was born on June 6, 1950 in Brussels. She made her first short film, Saute ma ville, at the age of seventeen. That same year, she dropped out of the INSAS film school in Brussels, and a year later dropped out of the theater studies program at the Université Internationale du Théâtre in Paris. Since then, she has lived in Paris, New York and Brussels.

She's one of the best-known experimental film makers of the 1970s and 1980s. From the 1990s on, her work has become increasingly accessible - with even occasional excursions into comedy, as in A Couch in New York (1996) - but she remains a sober film maker who designs her stories in her very own way. (Source: Berlin film festival)