Pioneer of feminist cinema, experimental film-maker, nomad: Chantal Akerman left behind over forty films. Films that reinvented cinema.
At the beginning of the 70s, in her early twenties, Akerman moves to New York where she draws inspiration from the world of experimental cinema, avant-garde dance and the theatre. Using the money she earns as a cashier in a porn cinema, she produces Hotel Monterey and La chambre, stealing film reels for her next project. She describes her career as planless. She is guided only by what she is interested in, and she assumes that others will like this too. Her mother Natalia, who is central to her work, dies while Marianne Lambert is making the film. She was deported to Auschwitz together with her parents – only Natalia survived. Akerman expresses her concern that she will no longer have anything to say. Much of what she has produced is related to her mother‘s trauma.

Lambert accompanies Akerman to all the places she has visited – from Brussels to Tel Aviv, from Paris to New York. I Don’t Belong Anywhere features excerpts from many of Akerman‘s films, including Jeanne Dielman – 23 Commerce Quai, 1080 Brussels, which gained her international recognition in 1975, or Last Days (2005), which was coproduced with Gus Van Sant. Akerman explains the origins of her film language, and collaborators, such as her editor Claire Atherton and Gus Van Sant, describe her exceptional relationship to filmic time and editing.