Join us for a short-film double feature to complement our current exhibition Confronting Femininity.

Agnès Varda L’Opéra-Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman) 1958

Pregnant with her first child, director Agnès Varda turned her camera on her own neighbourhood, capturing everyday life along the Rue Mouffetard. This mostly silent film employs experimental techniques that demonstrate her unconventional approach. Structured as a dreamlike poem, it moves between intimate scenes of young lovers, surreal and disturbing imagery offering metaphors for pregnancy, and documentary footage of street life. Its distinctly feminine lens shapes its construction, grounding abstract themes of creation in the embodied experience of expectant motherhood. In seventeen minutes, Varda explores cycles of life—childhood, youth, old age, frailty, death—not chronologically, but in the disorienting way we move through life. 17 minutes. French with English subtitles.

Chantal Akerman Saute ma Ville 1968

Chantel Akerman’s provocative first film detonates expectations of domestic femininity. Its title means roughly ‘blow up my town’. Just eighteen years old, having abandoned film school after three months, she wrote, directed, and performed in Saute ma Ville, shot on 16mm using equipment borrowed from the school. She plays a young woman returning to a cramped apartment, ostensibly to tidy and prepare a meal, but whose behaviour grows progressively frenzied, violently upending the household routine. The film remained trapped in the film lab for two years, until Akerman could afford its release. 13 minutes. French with English subtitles.