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 Queersighted: Class Acts
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In a Year of 13 Moons
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1978 • West Germany
Starring Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried JohnThis heartrendingly compassionate tragedy from Rainer Werner Fassbinder traces the final days in the life of Elvira (Volker Spengler), a transgender woman spurned by her former lover...
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Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean,...
Directed by Robert Altman • 1982 • United States
Starring Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen BlackTwenty years after James Dean’s death, a group of former superfans in rural Texas—not far from where the movie star shot his final film, GIANT—gather in an old Woolworth’s five-and-dime store to celebrate h...
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Streetwise
Directed by Martin Bell • 1984 • United States
Seattle, 1983. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: hom...
