Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion
Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness, JE TU IL ELLE (“I You He She”) finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision.
Up Next in LGBTQ+ Favorites
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Jubilee
Directed by Derek Jarman • 1978 • United Kingdom
Starring Jenny Runacre, Little Nell, Toyah WillcoxWhen Queen Elizabeth I asks her court alchemist to show her England in the future, she’s transported 400 years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fa...
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Querelle
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1982 • Germany
Starring Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne MoreauConjured from the unholy meeting of two iconoclastic queer artists, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film audaciously raises Jean Genet’s controversial novel to the level of myth. In an expressi...
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Born in Flames
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean SatterfieldA blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...
