De l’autre côté is the third of four in a series of political documentaries Akerman made in the 1990s and 2000s. Here, she deals with the dangerous border crossing between the US and Mexico, told through a series of interviews with those “on the other side” of the Mexican border. An impassive camera shows us the vast border wall and the endless rows of cars lined up to enter the US, and Akerman’s stillness and sense of objectivity grows to also encompass the dead – those silent voices who the interviewees talk about, lost to the desert in their attempts to cross over. It’s a film about suspension – waiting to cross, waiting to hear back – in a waiting game that never comes to its conclusion.

Golden Eighties is Akerman’s droll, colourful foray into musical comedy. Inspired by a Technicolor MGM musical, the film follows the lives of retail workers in a shopping centre, tracking their heartbreaks, triumphs and losses against the backdrop of the shopping mall itself. Lively, dynamic and noisy, its sheer difference to the rest of her work is a source of humour in itself; but it's a musical that keeps its themes firmly in view. With every shot of a hairstyling chair or rack of clothes, we’re reminded that the real struggle in this “golden” era of consumerism is to keep hold of an increasingly estranged sense of self.

Akerman’s languorous feature debut, which she made aged 24, premeditates the solipsism, restraint and courage of her later work. Starring herself as the lead, “I” spends the day alone in her bare room, writing letters and eating sugar out of the bag. The film is most remembered for its radical exhibitionism, Akerman's solitary nudity and the graphic scenes of intimacy with others. The 12-minute lesbian sex scene is still shocking – and a remarkable initial experiment in what would eventually become Akerman’s signature fearlessness. 

When Sight and Sound named Jeanne Dielman the greatest film of all time, it was not without controversy. As the long title warns us, the film is long, solipsistic, and, according to some, tedious to a point of being meditative – it is on the back of such nominations that the film has often been understood as a synecdoche for her wider filmography. Dielman is an incredibly rewarding watch, and especially remarkable given the director’s youth at the time. Of course, as with all of Akerman’s works, the film is inspired by her mother. 

Inspired by Proust’s La Prisonnière, Akerman’s La Captive is a claustrophobic examination of jealousy, secrecy, and sex. A wealthy but morose man, Simon, keeps his young girlfriend Ariane “captive” through his desire to keep her to himself – and know everything about her inner and outer world. A film about the assumptions men keep about women, and the secrets women keep from men, La Captive is almost a modern-day Dracula story, in its interweaving of the figure of the lover and the parasite.

Akerman moved to Manhattan in the early 1970s and returned in 1976, to film the montage shown in News From Home, a difficult and heartfelt documentary on exile. Overlaid throughout is her reading of her mother’s letters from this time, where maternal tenderness and pride is juxtaposed with debate, reprimand, or simply banality. This work makes for an intriguing pair with No Home Movie, showing how Akerman and her mother's relationship developed over the course of forty years. 

Akerman’s final work, a documentary of simplistic but compelling video call footage between her and her elderly mother, interspersed with ethereal and deliberate shots of isolated landscapes – amongst them Maman’s sleepy Brussels flat. Akerman’s mother died shortly after filming ended, and the director herself by suicide the following year. This depiction of maternity is complicated, however, by the fact that one of the landscapes depicted was the Negev-Naqab desert in Israel-Palestine, the site of Israel’s founding myth (“Let the desert bloom”) and justification for the destruction of the Palestinians. 

A moody roman à clef about a Belgian filmmaker going on tour around Europe to promote her latest work. Akerman’s usual modes of quietness and restraint, so well-formed in Jeanne Dielman, return here again, through protagonist Anna’s meaningless encounters with strangers. Anna’s deep malaise and sense of ennui expand to inhabit Europe itself outside the train windows – the journey takes her from Cologne to Paris, a route haunted by the sound of Nazi boots. Europe at peace remains unsettled – just as these brief encounters fail to sooth Anna’s unhappy soul. 

On a hot night in Brussels, sleepless civilians take to the streets and bars to distract themselves from their insomnia. There they find each other, and erotic chance encounters and reunions disperse amongst an epic 75-strong cast. Richard Brody described Toute une nuit as “docudramatic counterpart to Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse” with ​​a “demotic choreography akin to that of Pina Bausch” – these stories, if you can even call them that, are less narrative than fleeting vignette. The result is surprisingly energising, a call to arms for the spontaneous and nocturnal.

Akerman had initially set out to make a documentary celebrating the American South, an homage to writers such as Baldwin and Faulkner, when she came across what became the story of Sud. What she made, instead, was a meditative and psychological investigation into the murder of James Byrd, Jr., a black man living in Texas, at the hands of white supremacists. Here, the serene beauty of the Texan hinterlands contrasts nervously with the testimonies of the interviewees. How can the land contain such horrors? And how can the artfulness of cinema portray them?