Portrait of a young girl at the end of the 60s in Brussels

Brussels, April 1968. Fifteen-year-old Michèle skips school and meets twenty-year-old Paul, who has deserted from the military. A light and handheld camera follows Michèle and Paul drifting around the city as Michèle tries to figure out what she wants with love, life and the restlessness she senses in herself. The day culminates in a celebration where the emotions that have simmered along the way erupt in earnest. If, in her early films, Akerman made the idiom of the American avant-garde her own, here she enters into dialogue with Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and the rest of the French new wave.

About the film, Akerman has said, “My film is not autobiographical, but the emotions one finds in it are my own... It's about a 15-year-old girl who is thrust into the battlefield of love. About her desire for everything to explode around her. It was a script that was written in joy! However, how things have changed today compared to the time before '68! Today people no longer have hope of changing the world, but we had that back then. Today, young people are weighed down by a sense of powerlessness that the 68 generation did not know at all. I hope 'Portrait... 'can remind us that we must wake up and shake off our apathy.”

Director: Chantal Akerman
Starring: Circe Lethem, Julien Rassam, Joelle Marlier
Country/year: France, 1994
Running time: 63 min.
Formato: DCP
Language: English subtitles
Age limit: Allowed for children over 15
Original title: Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles

Part of the series: Chantal Akerman's fictions
Chantal Akerman was one of the most form-conscious and innovative filmmakers of her generation. Her fiction films range from melodrama and musical to romantic comedy and radically concentrated chamber plays and testify to an incredible curiosity to explore the possibilities of fiction.