Since the 1980s, famed cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has been present in much of Chantal Akerman’s work, whether through her numerous collaborations soundtracks, or as a protagonist (as in Rue Mallet-Stevens, 1986), or in this case, as the subject of an extended documentary portrait. The film begins with a voiceover from Akerman, describing and situating her subject, after which Wieder-Atherton takes over the narrative, sitting before the camera for an extended presentation of her life and art. Wieder-Atherton then performs some short pieces by Claudio Monteverdi, Luciano Berio, Leos Janacek, Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert, either solo or accompanied by a small ensemble. As well as insights into an artist, this film offers a precious cinematic moment of listening.

"My mother because, in one way or another, I talk about her constantly in my films, and often, I wonder if I have really worked so hard for her, about her, in relation to her, also my mother and her relationship with the movies, a relationship sometimes of recognition, sometimes of negation". – Chantal Akerman
In this 2007 interview, an off-camera Chantal Akerman interviews her mother about her films. The producers of the interview originally intended to edit out Akerman’s questions but ultimately decided to keep them in to preserve the candor of the mother-daughter rapport.

Chantal Akerman meets with elderly Jewish women in Paris, all of them survivors of the Shoah, and listens to their family stories. Between interviews, Akerman's mother Natalia speaks of her own family. Made for a French miniseries on grandmothers.

8月15日，在巴黎，一个年轻的芬兰女孩在一间公寓里感到无聊。

1973 film by Chantal Akerman

几位年轻男女相继来到 Hôtel des Acacias，他们充满希望、渴望和活力。在熙熙攘攘的酒店里，每个人都在寻找爱情。Hôtel des Acacias》是尚塔尔-阿克曼（Chantal Akerman）1982 年在比利时 INSAS 视听学院指导的一项练习。

Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest of all pianists, plays and reflects on Franz Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. As he points out, Schubert can’t have known that he was soon to die, so they probably do not embody the air of resignation and finality future generations have sentimentally insisted they bear. They were however long neglected, all but forgotten, and only in more recent times have they come to be treasured and performed. The repose and wisdom of the maestro, together with the patient observation of one who is no stranger to the idea of the irrevocably lost, of the erasures of history, and of the value of fragile objects passed carefully from generation to generation, is a joy.

Filmed as part of Akerman’s film school entrance exam, these raw and playful 8mm miniatures capture life at a Brussels fairground and the courtyard of a hotel, alongside an oblique, two-part fiction set in the seaside shops of Knokke.

I’d like to film as far away as possible, in Xanghai for instance, and describe, using voice-over, with an extreme precision, everything I know about my street in Paris, in the 20th District, which is quite mestizo and where Muslims and Africans constitute the majority. There’s a school, three bars, and a building recalling the Babel tower. My intention in thus to generate some disorder using the differences and similarities of those worlds.

The beginnings of Chantal Akerman behind the camera at the ages of 17 and 18: four films shot in Super 8 during the summer, presented to enter the National Higher Institute of Performing Arts and Broadcasting Techniques (INSAS, Brussels) in September 1967, where she was accepted

A 2nd short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman in Knokke to be used to be accepted at INSAS.

A 4th short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman with her friends in Brussels, shot in front of the former Hotel van Cleve-Ravenstein coincidentally the place where now CINEMATEK and the archives of the Chantel Akerman Fondation are residing.

A 3rd short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman in Knokke to be used to be accepted at INSAS starring her friends her mother and herself.