Chantal Akerman, a fifteen-year-old girl from Brussels, often skips school to go to the movies. One day she sees Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le fou" (1965) and decides to become a filmmaker that very day.

SWIMMING POOL presents “Chantal Akerman: Too Far Too Close”, a beautiful MHKA publication that takes a deep dive into Akerman’s oeuvre as one of the most influential of her generation.

An oeuvre dominated by women, originally built through the voice of her mother and ultimately arriving at her own. Movies of women lingering in the city landscape, on stoops, between arcades, at bars or park benches. Movies of women smoking, solely appearing in film-noir angles or ironic frontal shots. Movies of women moving wordlessly through the same household spaces. Movies of women in 3D: domestic, dysfunctional and disintegrating.

Akerman pioneered a visual language of women, of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred, of caretaking and recordkeeping. A self-devised mythos where climaxes involve dropped spoons and pots of overcooked potatoes.