Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Alain Dahan,Marilyn Watelet
Screenwriter: Chantal Akerman
Cinematographer: Jean Penzer
Editor: Francine Sandberg
Production Designer: Janou Shammas,Christian Marti
Costume Designer: Nathalie du Roscoat
Key Cast: Magali Noël,Helmut Griem,Lea Massari,Aurore Clément,Hanns Zischler

Beautifully restored in 4K, Akerman’s feature follow-up to Jeanne Dielman is an introspective portrait of a filmmaker on the road.

Paris-based Belgian director Anna (Aurore Clément, A Private Life, MIFF 2025) is on a solo promotional tour for her most recent film, travelling for three days across Germany, Belgium and France. In each chilly location, she meets someone to spend time with, as the camera follows along on their largely monologue-driven encounters. Moving from a one-night stand in Cologne to a run-in with an ex-fiancée’s mother at a station, a conversation on a train and an evening with a lover in Paris, Anna’s journey reaches its emotional crest in a night spent in a hotel room with her mother (Lea Massari) in Brussels – the interaction that proves the most revealing about her interior life, otherwise kept at a cool remove.

Chantal Akerman’s fictional narrative functions in large part as a quasi self-portrait, whose similarly named protagonist – Akerman’s middle name was Anne – also shares the director’s geographical background, profession and sense of rootlessness. Anna’s itinerant lifestyle and emotional detachment to her surroundings are paralleled by elegant, exacting cinematography and haunted by the echoes of war that would resound in her later work. Even more central to Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, however, is the theme that recurs across Akerman’s entire filmography: the connection between mother and daughter.

“A curiously under-seen and underappreciated work … arguably the most incisive, penetrating, and downright mournful examination of the female psyche in Akerman’s catalogue.” –PopMatters

4K Restoration. Restored in 2023 by the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK) and the Chantal Akerman Foundation, under supervision of Sabine Lancelin and Marilyn Watelet, with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.