LA CAUTIVA

Chantal Akerman

Belgium

- 2000

Simon lives in an opulent flat with his grandmother, their maid Françoise, and Ariane, his lover. Convinced that Ariane is having a liaison with the luminous Andrée, Simon takes to treating Ariane as a virtual prisoner, dogging her every move and restricting her social activities. The neurosis of a wealthy but disaffected would-be writer, madly besotted with a woman, and the desire to reach an impossible complete fusion leads him to a compulsive obsession.

Chantal Akerman

Born in Brussels in 1950 as the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants, she died in 2015. She made her first film, ‘Blow Up My Town’, when she was only eighteen and directed her first feature in New York in 1972, but it was with ‘Jeanne Dielman’ (1975) that critics and audiences discovered her work and she positioned herself as a filmmaker of the feminist avant-garde (the film was named Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 ‘Sight and Sound’ poll). A versatile artist, she directed almost 50 features and documentaries, wrote books and made installations. In Valladolid, she competed in the Official Section in 1980 with ‘The Meetings of Anna’ and in 1982 with ‘A Whole Night’, as well as participating in Meeting Point in 1992 with the omnibus film ‘Lest we Forget’.