Je tu il elle

Akerman’s debut feature, with its 10-minute lesbian sex scene, revealed its maker to be a radical and uncompromising force in cinema.

Akerman’s ambiguous triptych was based on her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels. A woman (played by the filmmaker) holes up in a room, obsessively eating sugar and rearranging furniture. Then we follow her hunt for love and connection – first with a truck driver, then an ex-lover.

With its uninterrupted erotic-free ten-minute lesbian sex scene, this is one of the most radical and assured sequences in any feature debut from the 1970s.