Has any director used the kitchen to such devastating effect as Chantal Akerman?

In her first film, “Saute ma Ville” (“Blow Up My Town”), made in 1968 when she was just 18, Ms. Akerman sings cheerily as she trashes a tiny kitchen, then rests her head on a lit burner. The screen goes black, and there is the sound of an explosion. This Belgian filmmaker’s last film, “No Home Movie,” which will be released on April 1, is a documentary about losing her mother, set largely in her mother’s Brussels apartment.

In one scene, the two sit at the kitchen table, eating potatoes that Ms. Akerman has prepared, telling her mother that even she, the peripatetic artist, has mastered a few domestic skills. It’s not hard to see the moment as a reference to a memorable potato-peeling scene in “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Ms. Akerman’s masterpiece from 1975 that depicts, in exacting detail and repetition, the daily routine of a Brussels housewife (Delphine Seyrig), up to an unexpected, violent climax.

The way that kitchens — as much as bedrooms — can confine women but also provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation and serve as a backdrop to the drama and trauma of daily life is a recurring motif in her work. Her features and documentaries will be the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as tributes at Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, and the Museum of the Moving Image, starting this month and running through April, offering New York audiences a fresh look at a highly influential avant-garde figure, who died in October at 65.

“Her cinema dealt a lot with confinement — how we close ourselves in and how we find ways to escape this prison that our spirit can build, that our body can build,” said Marianne Lambert, whose documentary on Ms. Akerman, “I Don’t Belong Anywhere,” opens Wednesday, March 30. “That was connected to the history of her mother and of the Shoah.”