Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville | Blow up the Town (1968)

This is Chantal Akerman's first film, a 13-minute short by a woman who had very little education in film but soon learned. She was born in 1950, began making films as a result of seeing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, and killed herself in 2015 after a spell in hospital due to depression.

Akerman is the only actor in her own film. Unnamed, she enters her flat with a bunch of flowers after collecting the mail. She makes a pasta meal, washes it down with a glass of wine, empties her cupboard of kitchen tools which she leaves on the floor and then half-heartedly cleans it, seals up the door with strong adhesive tape, throws the cat onto the balcony, burns a paper, turns on the gas and boom, boom, boom! Akerman's career began and ended with a suicide.