Film writer and director

Born: June 6, 1950.

Died: October 5, 2015

Chantal Akerman, who has died aged 65, never made much impact at the local Cineworld, but she was regarded by many critics and festival audiences as one of the most important and most challenging European film-makers of the past half-century.

Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles spends much of its three-and-a-half hour running time establishing the drudgery of the title character's life before a final explosion of violence. But it was hailed as a feminist masterpiece and figures in lists of the greatest films ever made.

Her last film No Home Movie begins with a shot of a tree being buffeted by the wind for several minutes, a symbol perhaps of resilience and survival. It then moves on to interviews conducted over several months with her mother, a survivor of Auschwitz who was dying even as the film was made.

However, even the critics struggled with No Home Movie and it was booed at the press screening before its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival two months ago.

She was born Chantal Anne Akerman to Polish-Jewish parents in Brussels in 1950, just five years after the end of the Second World War, during which her mother Nelly and grandparents were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Only her mother survived.

When she was 15, Akerman went to see Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 existentialist classic Pierrot Le Fou and decided there and then to become a film-maker. She briefly attended film school and financed her 1968 short Saute Ma Ville (Blow Up My Town) by trading diamonds on the Antwerp stock exchange.

It portrayed a young woman (played by Akerman) coming home and cooking, eating, cleaning her flat and then killing herself. Akerman expanded on some of these themes in Jeanne Dielman, which she both wrote and directed.

Akerman's large body of work included dramas, documentaries and cinematic essays, video installations, musicals and even a romantic comedy A Couch in New York (1996), with William Hurt and Juliette Binoche, although she clashed with the stars and it was not a happy experience.

She showed warmth and humour in a Skype interview after a screening of her Joseph Conrad adaptation Almayer's Folly at Edinburgh's Filmhouse three years ago, but anxiety and alienation were recurrent themes in her films. And making No Home Movie and the loss of her mother took a huge emotional toll.

In a recent interview Akerman said: "Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother. And there is no home anymore, because she isn't there."

Akerman suffered from depression and Le Monde reported that the cause of death was suicide.

BRIAN PENDREIGH