Chantal Akerman was born in 1950, in Brussels, to Jewish Polish parents who had survived the Holocaust. At 18, she funded her first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), with money she made by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. Akerman, who’d wanted to be a filmmaker since 1965, when she saw Jean-Luc Godard Pierrot’s le fou, went on to make groundbreaking films of her own. She challenged feminist tropes and influenced the Belgian avant-garde. Akerman died in 2015. This retrospective traces her atypical journey, showcasing never-before-seen images and working documents from her archive. —Elena Clavarino