Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 10:00 PM
Los Feliz Theatre, Los Angeles
### **ABOUT THE FILMS:** **“The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman,” 1971, Dir. Chantal Akerman, 32 Mins, Janus Films, Belgium** *In French with English subtitles.* Chantal Akerman somewhat disowned this unfinished film, in which the beautiful, lithe Claire Wauthion plays the mother of a sweet young girl, Daphné, with whom she reads Babar, prepares lunch and tries on dresses. Privately, with Akerman as a kind of mute but receptive presence, Wauthion confides her own sense of jealousy and disappointment toward her husband (“He really is such a baby”) and casts a critical eye on her body, citing a litany of physical shortcomings in a nearly five-minute single take that Akerman would repurpose for her 2007 video installation “In the Mirror.” FORMAT: DCP **LETTERS HOME, 1986, Dir. Chantal Akerman, 104 Mins, Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, France** *In French with English subtitles.* In the brilliantly staged, heartbreaking Letters Home, based on a performance of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris on November 27, 1984, the great Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie enact letters the poet Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia from her teenage years until the week before her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. FORMAT: DCP