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Je Tu Il Elle (18)

Queer 70s

— ,Cinema 2
A black and white still from Je Tu Il Elle, showing two naked women laying face to face on a bed, touching each other's faces.

Chantal Akerman’s feature debut, made when she was just 24, is a potent and radical portrait of the search for connection, culminating in a famous 10-minute lesbian sex scene.

The year before she created her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, Chantal Akerman made this assured and radical movie. She plays a woman whom we first meet alone in her apartment. Later, she hitchhikes and has a sexual encounter with a male truck driver. Finally, she reconnects with an ex-lover (Claire Wauthion), leading to a lengthy sex scene – an extraordinarily intimate depiction of same sex love for the time when it was made.

Je Tu Il Elle breaks many of the rules of cinema in its representation of alienation. It's a key work in Akerman’s extraordinary filmography and still startles with its frankness and uncompromising portrayal of female sexuality.

Tagged with: Cinema Queer 70s

In French with English subtitles

The screening on 24 Jun includes an introduction by Mekella Broomberg. 

Mekella Broomberg is a Creative Producer, maker of festivals and Humanist Celebrant. She has written, performed and produced in the worlds of literature, puppetry, circus and film. She is the Head of Programme at the Royal Society of Literature.

Film information

Release year: 1974

Country: Belgium, France

Director: Chantal Akerman

Runtime: 1 hour 26 min

'In her outrageously accomplished and inventive first feature, Akerman fuses the experiments she’d seen in New York with the sexy cool of the French New Wave. Moreover, she gives viewers and filmmakers alike permission to be the heroines of our own stories: appetitive, desiring, lovelorn, naked, mobile, ecstatic' 

So Mayer, The F Word

Queer 70s

Cinema 2