Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - WFS Film Fest screening - members only booking

PG

BOOKING DETAILS

To book, you must have a valid full year membership to the Wellington Film Society. You can book up to two seats per film - but all attendees must be valid full year members. We are making half the seats in the theatre bookable. The rest of the seats will be available on the day on a 'first come, first served' basis.

If you have a three film sampler membership, you cannot book in advance. You can attend screenings on the ‘first come, first served’ basis for the remaining seats. We will clip your card for each screening you attend. Bring a buddies are not valid.

Your membership must be valid at the time of booking, and also at the time of the screening in June. If you need to renew during this time, make sure you do so via our website - https://wellingtonfilms.nz

You must book through Humanitix using the same name and email as your Wellington Film Society membership, in order to enable cross-referencing.

Places are bookable per film rather than for the whole festival – so you can pick what you want to see.  We’ll be clearing and cleaning the theatre between films so you’ll need to leave, just like between our usual Monday 6 and 8:30 screenings. Seating will be unallocated for all screenings, as normal.

On the day of the screening, we will check both your Humanitix booking via a QR code, and your Film Society membership.

Please be on time, If you are not, we may give your booking away to members who are waiting. Please be seated in the cinema five minutes before the screening time. After that point we do not guarantee your booking is valid.

FILM DETAILS

In 2022, Sight & Sound released the results of their ten-yearly poll of the greatest films of all time according to critics and directors. Since the poll had started in 1952, Citizen Kane had been the top film, until 2012 when Vertigo had taken over. Now, however, there was a surprising title at number 1: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Belgian director Chantal Akerman was only 25 when the film was released in 1975, but over time her film has become a feminist landmark; little-seen but highly esteemed.

Over the film’s three hour and twenty minute runtime, we see middle-aged widow Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) go about her daily activities, cooking and doing domestic tasks for extended periods, over the course of three separate days. Each afternoon, she is visited by a different silent man who pays her for sex. While Jeanne’s sex work would be the focus of a typical film, here it gets as much attention as cleaning the bathtub. The overall effect is a meditation on the ‘playing the part’ of women in the home that, through the extended scenes of “women’s work” that are usually never the focus of cinema, becomes a kind of cinematic scream of protest. 

While the film’s runtime might make it a daunting prospect, we thought that a long, slower-paced film like this one would work well for a Saturday 10am session. Grab your coffees and settle in for the rare chance to see Jeanne Dielman on the big screen, and enjoy a few hours of daylight before heading back to the Embassy that evening! 

“…on the side of form, it rigorously records her domestic routine in extended time and from a fixed camera position. In a film that, agonisingly, depicts women’s oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.” – Laura Mulvey, Sight & Sound