12 - 16 Jun. A Nos Amours continues with their retrospective of the complete film works of Chantal Akerman with five incredibly rare short films - made in the 1980s and never before seen in the UK.

12 - 16 June.

J'ai faim, j'ai froid (1984) 12 mins

Two young women at night in Brussels. They finish each other’s sentences, they smoke each other’s cigarettes: they are on the lam together. They are joined at the hip and ready for the challenges of the day - as women in the world - as long as they stick together. Spritely, playful, composed.  Akerman has said, in an interview with Nicole Brenez, “My friend and I . A little musical comedy without singing”. Is this film therefore autobiography?  

Lettre de cineaste (1984) 9 mins

A filmmaker’s self-portrait, asking hard questions of herself and of us. Invoking Aurore Clément as a kind of stand-in or proxy, a glamorous counterpart to Akerman who sports a drawn-on moustache. What is cinema for? Who is it for? If the Mosaic prohibition on making graven images includes film images, then where does that leave a Jewish filmmaker?  

La paresse (1986) 14 mins

A segment on sloth from a German TV commission on the theme ‘Seven Women, Seven Sins’. As Akerman also told  Nicole Brenez: "Claire (Wieder-Atheron) worked, while I stayed in bed".

Le marteau (1986) 4 minutes

The hammer is the tool a sculptor uses to chip away at the block. It is the emblematic tool of French artist Jean-Luc Vilmouth. Akerman here instigates a game of musical chairs. The winner is then permitted to hurl the hammer out into the starry night.  

Rue Mallet Stevens (1986) 7 mins

In concrete terms, between 1926-27 Robert Mallet-Stevens , architect of modernist inclination, made a set of cubist houses in the 16th Arrondisment, on what was then named Rue Mallet-Stevens. This film, enigmatic, cryptic even, seems set in that very street. A courting - or perhaps parting-couple cling to one another. A car approaches, its radio tuned to a station playing a song from Akerman’s (yet to be realised) film Golden Eighties. What looks like a baby is brought out of a car by night, and taken into an apartment where a woman is playing a cello.