Chantal Akerman, pioneering Belgian film director and theorist, dies aged 65

Chantal Akerman, widely considered a leading light of experimental European cinema, and an important influence on directors such as Gus van Sant, Todd Haynes and Michael Haneke, has died at the age of 65.

The death is unexpected: the film-maker was at the Locarno film festival last month with new film No Home Movie, a video essay about her mother, Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014, and whose anxieties were a perennial concern in Akerman’s work.

The film was badly received at its press screening, and the New York Times reports that friends feared for Akerman, who had “previously suffered emotional breakdowns”. Her death was confirmed on Tuesday by her sister, Sylviane Akerman, and by Nicola Mazzanti, the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Le Monde are reporting the death as suicide.

Next month, she was due to appear at a Q&A session and give a masterclass in London as the culmination of a complete retrospective of her work at the ICA cinema.

The first UK exhibition of her art and video installation work, including the premiere of NOW (2015) is also scheduled to open at the University of Westminster in late October. Organisers for the show have confirmed it will proceed as planned. It is co-curated by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, whose A Nos Amours was established to screen rare and overlooked masterpieces, such as Akerman specialised in, and which had focused on the film-maker for two years.

Born in 1950, Akerman’s most famous work is 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; shot a decade after an epiphany that her future lay in film-making while watching Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. Jeanne Dielman is a real-time study of a middle-aged widow (Delphine Seyrig) who lives with her teenage son in a small Brussels flat. The film follows her as she completes drab domestic tasks and tries to make ends meet through occasional prostitution. The New York Times called it “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema”.

The long, frank takes featured in Jeanne Dielman were a feature of Akerman’s work, including in other notable movies such as I, You, He, She (1976), the 1977 documentary News from Home and From the East (1993), all of which also explored the boundaries between figurative and abstract film-making.

Akerman also served on film festival juries and lectured widely, in 2011, she joined the staff of New York’s City College full time.

Film-maker and critic Mark Cousins was among those paying tribute to her on Twitter.