This morning, we learned of the heartbreaking news that filmmaker Chantal Akerman has passed away suddenly at the age of 65., reports the Guardian The devastating loss comes just as her celebrated new documentary No Home Movie plays in the New York Film Festival. The brilliant Belgian director, writer, teacher, and cinematic hero is perhaps best known for her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles but made so many other fascinating films both before and after. With a career spanning half a century, she was a rare visionary whose daring and intelligent portraits human soul have left their undeniable mark on the world and the hearts of so many. From the haunted stillness of Hotel Monterey and the longing and love of News From Home to the revolutionary Jeanne Dielman, her films gave a greater understanding to how we process everyday life, both its sorrows and its wonder.

As Akerman’s  European Graduate School biography notes, via Fandor:

Each film of Akerman is a world unto itself; they are often shot in real time in a space that is part of the character’s identity. She often depicts women at work and at home, women’s relationships with men, women, children, food, love, sex, romance, art. Each frame is carefully composed, and to blink is to miss something crucial, as every succeeding moment is pregnant with the expectation that something is about to happen. Akerman’s parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland, and the “nothing” they refused to talk about became the core of her inspiration. The weight of history is evident in every moment of her work, though she is interested in the history with the small ‘h’. She films the life on the margins, and her subversive strategy comes through a focus on minutiae, on the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life. The main protagonists of her films sometimes remind us of the celebratedflâneurs who find the hidden wonders tucked away in the corners, and sometimes they resemble the automatons that emerge in the tasks of daily lives. What Akerman brings out are the unforeseen glitches in routine and the dissymmetry in the known patterns of life. Nevertheless, many have noticed that besides showing the troublesome complexity of human existence, Akerman is also a romantic. Her films are full with music, magic of chance, yearning and hope.

Today, you can reflect on her incredible life by absorbing her fascinating world of cinema. Read her full NY Times obituary here.

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLLES

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades. — CC

NEWS FROM HOME

Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection. — CC

HOTEL MONTEREY

Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. — CC

JE TU IL ELLE

In her provocative first feature, Chantal Akerman stars as an aimless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend. With its famous real-time carnal encounter and its daring minimalism, Je tu il elle is Akerman’s most sexually audacious film. — CC

LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA

In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, Anna, an accomplished filmmaker (played by Aurore Clément), makes her way through a series of European cities to promote her latest movie. Via a succession of eerie, exquisitely shot, brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—we come to see her emotional and physical detachment from the world. — CC

LA CHAMBRE

In Chantal Akerman’s early short film La chambre, we see the furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York. — CC