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The Meetings of Anna poster

The Meetings of Anna

1978 · Chantal Akerman

For a solitary, contemplative night when you want cinema as a mood rather than a plot — something to sink into and sit with. This is a challenge, not comfort viewing, but if you've ever felt like a stranger in your own life it will find you.

What it's about

Anna, a Belgian filmmaker, travels by train through Europe to present her latest film — Cologne, then onward through a chain of hotel rooms, station platforms, and brief encounters. Strangers, an old flame, her mother: everyone she meets unburdens themselves to her, while Anna herself stays courteous, tender, and just out of reach.

The experience

Slow, hushed, and hypnotic — a film of long stillnesses where the emotion gathers in what isn't said. It leaves you with a particular ache: the loneliness of being the person everyone confides in, drifting through rooms that all look the same.

Performances

Aurore Clément carries nearly every frame as Anna, doing extraordinary work mostly by listening — her guarded face making each confession land on us instead. Lea Massari's turn as her mother gives the film its warmest, most piercing passage.

The craft

Chantal Akerman composes every shot with frontal, symmetrical precision — corridors, beds, and train windows framed like altarpieces, the camera holding still while people talk. The formal control isn't coldness; it's how the film lets a postwar Europe's unease seep into hotel rooms, and on a big screen the compositions become quietly overwhelming.

Why it matters

Akerman's first fiction feature after her landmark breakthrough, now regarded as one of the great films about the traveling artist's solitude and a touchstone for generations of filmmakers drawn to stillness.

Reception & legacy: how The Meetings of Anna was received, argued over, and remembered →

Chantal Akerman's first fiction feature after Jeanne Dielman sent a version of herself out into the world: Aurore Clément plays Anna, a Belgian filmmaker drifting by train from one European city to the next to present her latest film, receiving confessions from strangers, lovers, and family in a chain of hotel rooms and station platforms. Akerman frames it all with her signature frontal symmetry — corridors, beds, and windows arranged like altarpieces, the camera fixed while people unburden themselves to a woman who mostly listens. Beneath the stillness runs an entire continent's unease: the itinerary crosses a Germany still haunted by the war, and Anna's tender, evasive reunion with her mother (Lea Massari) carries the weight of Akerman's own family history as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Made when Akerman was still in her twenties, it is among cinema's great studies of the artist as perpetual transient — of someone at home only in transit — and its night trains, fluorescent lobbies, and half-lit phone calls have echoed through decades of slow, searching European cinema since. Few films have made loneliness look so composed.

Lines of influence