Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • Directed by Catherine Breillat

    1 season

    Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-ag...

  • Songs of Earth

    Movie

    Directed by Margreth Olin • 2023 • Norway

    Executive produced by Liv Ullmann and Wim Wenders, Songs of Earth is a majestic, awe-inspiring symphony for the big screen. Director Margreth Olin’s eighty-four-year-old father is our guide, bringing us through Norway’s most scenic valley, where he grew ...

  • Directed by Stephanie Rothman

    1 season

    The boldly transgressive films of Stephanie Rothman use the conventions of low-budget exploitation cinema to cannily subvert patriarchal systems and the male gaze. Beginning her career as an assistant to Roger Corman, she made the leap to director at his newly formed production company New World ...

  • The Babadook

    Movie

    Directed by Jennifer Kent • 2014 • Australia
    Starring Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall

    An instant cult classic of psychological horror, the feature debut from Jennifer Kent packages a disquieting exploration of trauma, grief, and healing in the form of a spellbinding fairy-tale nightma...

  • Rebels at the Typewriter

    1 season

    The 1930s were a golden age for women writers, who penned some of the most outrageous provocations of the pre-Code era and created memorable, true-to-life female characters for the period’s reigning stars. While writers like renowned humorist Anita Loos (RED-HEADED WOMAN) and two-time Academy Awa...

  • Not a Pretty Picture
    Movie + 2 extras

    Not a Pretty Picture

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Martha Coolidge • 1975 • United States
    Starring Michele Manenti, Jim Carrington, Anne Mundstuk

    Trailblazing filmmaker Martha Coolidge made her feature debut with this unflinchingly personal hybrid of documentary and fiction. Centered on an intense reenactment of Coolidge’s experienc...

  • Variety
    Movie + 1 extra

    Variety

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Bette Gordon • 1983 • United States
    Starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. Davidson

    The provocative, sexually charged tale of a woman’s journey of self-discovery, Bette Gordon’s independent landmark offers a bold challenge to conventional notions of feminism and pornography. ...

  • Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Sarah Jacobson • 1996 • United States
    Starring Lisa Gerstein, Chris Enright, Greg Cruikshank, Marny Snyder Spoons

    The punk-spirited films of Sarah Jacobson combine B-movie aesthetics, riot grrrl feminism, and the DIY ethos of the 1990s zine scene into unfiltered and subversive looks...

  • Alma Punk

    Movie

    Directed by Sarah Minter • 1991 • Mexico
    Starring Ciro Basilio, Ana Hernandez, Marco Pavon

    Alma (Ana Hernández) spends her days in screen printing, selling records at swap meets, and rehearsing plays and making fanzines with her friends. But Mexico City’s vibrant counterculture scene won’t keep...

  • Girlfight
    Movie + 4 extras

    Girlfight

    Movie + 4 extras

    Directed by Karyn Kusama • 2000 • United States
    Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderon

    Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she lea...

  • Girlhood

    Movie

    Directed by Céline Sciamma • 2014 • France
    Starring Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh

    Fed up with her abusive family situation, lack of school prospects, and the “boys’ law” in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes he...

  • Old Boyfriends
    Movie + 1 extra

    Old Boyfriends

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Joan Tewkesbury • 1979 • United States
    Starring Talia Shire, Richard Jordan, Keith Carradine

    The sole theatrical feature directed by Joan Tewkesbury—whose screenplays for NASHVILLE and THIEVES LIKE US yielded two of Robert Altman’s finest films—is an endlessly intriguing, shaggy-dog ...

  • Directed by Ayoka Chenzira

    1 season

    Working across narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and interactive cinema, Ayoka Chenzira brings the inner worlds of Black women—their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and struggles—to life with heart, humor, and insight. An all-around creative force, she made her mark as an animator with a...

  • Directed by Sara Driver

    1 season

    Everyday reality slips into surrealist reverie in the uncanny visions of Sara Driver, whose films possess the hallucinatory textures and hypnotic rhythms of a waking dream. A central but often overlooked linchpin of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, Driver made her directorial debut with YO...

  • Directed by Lizzie Borden

    1 season

    Revolutionary in both content and form, the films of Lizzie Borden testify to the potential of a politically committed cinema to fight back against prevailing representations of women on-screen. Her first three features—the long-unavailable experimental documentary REGROUPING, the dystopian sci-f...

  • Directed by Rosine Mbakam

    1 season

    Working across both documentary and narrative, Cameroonian auteur Rosine Mbakam makes intimate, exquisitely observed portraits of West African women both at home and abroad that illuminate their inner lives with quiet force. In her early shorts DOORS OF THE PAST and YOU WILL BE MY ALLY and in her...

  • Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka

    1 season

    Kinuyo Tanaka was already one of Japan’s greatest actors—celebrated for her collaborations with auteurs like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse—when she took an unprecedented risk by embarking on a directing career in a studio system that actively discouraged female filmmakers. The s...

  • Bergman Island
    Movie + 3 extras

    Bergman Island

    Movie + 3 extras

    Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • 2021 • France
    Starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska

    Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve embarks on a luminous summertime odyssey to the home of Ingmar Bergman for her seventh feature, a graceful, shape-shifting tale about the interplay of life and art and the ...

  • Our Body

    Movie

    Directed by Claire Simon • 2023 • France

    Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the d...

  • Our Father, the Devil

    Movie

    Directed by Ellie Foumbi • 2021 • United States
    Starring Babetida Sadjo, Souleymane Sy Savane, Jennifer Tchiakpe

    Ellie Foumbi’s elegant moral thriller is a grippingly intense exploration of trauma, revenge, and forgiveness that stands as one of the most exciting feature debuts in recent memory. ...

  • Directed by Shirley Clarke

    1 season

    Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’...

  • Directed by Isabel Sandoval

    1 season

    “I’m drawn to women with secrets,” says acclaimed Filipina director Isabel Sandoval, who toys with genre conventions in her subversive portraits of women tangled up in complex sociopolitical realities. A true auteur, Sandoval wrote, produced, directed, and starred in her feature debut, SEÑORITA, ...

  • Plan 75

    Movie

    Directed by Chie Hayakawa • 2022 • Japan, Philippines
    Starring Chieko Baisho, Hayato Isomura, Stefanie Arianne

    In a dystopian future, Japan’s government launches Plan 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic ...

  • Farewell Amor
    Movie + 6 extras

    Farewell Amor

    Movie + 6 extras

    Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
    Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson

    In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil wa...