A film, Jeanne Dielman, directed by a woman has been picked as the best by experts

A group of experts chose the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by a woman as the greatest of all time.

Directed by Chantal Akerman, the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, has topped the Sight and Sound poll of the British Film Institute. It is for the first time a film directed by a woman has reached the top ten.

This poll runs every decade and it has been criticized for a lack of diversity. For 40 years the winning spot was held by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and it was overtaken by Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock in 2012.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was released in 1975. It was a story of a Belgian widow who turns to prostitution to make ends meet, but killed one of her clients. Like previous winners, this film was not well-known outside the world of film criticism but it has been lauded as a "masterpiece", and a ground-breaking piece of feminist film. A film critic and writer Lillian Crawford contributed to the poll and said that the film was an "essential text" in feminist cinema.