12 Quotes by Chantal Akerman

When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.

I was not interested by cinema when I was young.

Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother.

I realized that my mother was at the center of my work, because now that my mother is no longer there, there's nobody left.

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

I am from a woman's family. My great-grandmother had three daughters and a son. My grandmother had two daughters, and my mother had two daughters. My sister had a daughter and then finally a son. You should have seen my father with the son. He could not believe that finally there was a boy in the family.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

I am a woman, and I am Jewish; I'm a film-maker, and I'm a writer, so you cannot just put me in one box.