“Is this really what you want to learn from the past?”

– Breaking Plates (Karen Pearlman, 2025)

Let the train take the strain they say, and so I did, curating my own idiosyncratic, mostly silent, tour of female film history this week – and all by rail. Please rest assured that no leading ladies were lashed to the tracks in the making of this movie. Nor is this post sponsored by Eurostar. I should be so lucky.

This cute preamble has simply delayed me telling you that I took the choo-choo to Brussels, birthplace of such 20^th-century film icons as Audrey Hepburn, Agnès Varda (foreshadowing) and Chantal Akerman. So my first stop, naturally, was a pilgrimage to one of the most famous addresses in cinema history, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, to pay homage to Akerman, Delphine Seyrig, and Jeanne Dielman herself by posing outside the door of the heroine’s apartment building wielding a potato peeler. Important feminist film praxis, and in the estimable company of Maggie Hennefeld to boot. All joking aside, there is a frisson to be felt standing on this spot, where Akerman filmed the exteriors for her 1975 masterpiece, and it is in a very pleasant corner of the city. Do visit, with or without kitchen implements. Don’t miss the Marguerite Duras quotes that pave the nearby park, and the gorgeous, watercolour-style mural of Dielman at her kitchen table by Spanish muralist Alba Fabre Sacristan. I recommend checking out her portfolio on Instagram: the subject matter of the majority of her work throws a different light on this apparently demure picture of a middle-aged woman in her housecoat.

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