Ever since she emerged in the 1970s as one of the most significant contemporary directors, Chantal Akerman has been an innovative and rigorous stylist whose lucid movies explore the territory between reality and desire. She has said that her films are “mainly preoccupied with the cinematic resolution of my emotional life.” With a clear-eyed understanding of how the medium can, and can’t, express internal states, Akerman examines deeply intimate feelings, and alienation, in physical, concrete terms. The terrain of her films is private, but there is always a documentary impulse at work, and she finds ways to let us see movies, and the world around us, in a new light. Akerman is in New York City this year to teach at the City University of New York.