Female Gaze: Women Directors + Women Cinematographers

Female Gaze: Women Directors + Women Cinematographers

24 Episodes

This sprawling selection of films both directed and shot by women testifies to an extraordinary tradition of female collaboration behind the camera. Spanning the last half century of cinema and including work by trailblazing director-cinematographer duos such as Chantal Akerman and Babette Mangolte (JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES; NEWS FROM HOME), Claire Denis and Agnès Godard (BEAU TRAVAIL, LET THE SUNSHINE IN), and Jane Campion and Sally Bongers (A GIRL’S OWN STORY, SWEETIE), as well as fruitful recent partnerships like Céline Sciamma and Crystel Fournier (TOMBOY, GIRLHOOD) and Josephine Decker and Ashley Connor (BUTTER ON THE LATCH, THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY), these extraordinary films reveal a vital legacy of visionary women seizing the tools of visual storytelling and opening up new possibilities for cinema.

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Female Gaze: Women Directors + Women Cinematographers
  • Female Gaze: In Their Own Words

    Episode 1

    In this program, female directors, cinematographers, and actors discuss their work.

  • Female Gaze Teaser

    Episode 2

  • Joyce at 34

    Episode 3

    Directed by Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill • 1972 • United States
    Starring Joyce Chopra

    In feminist filmmaker Joyce Chopra’s JOYCE AT 34 (codirected with Claudia Weill, who would later direct the great unsung GIRLFRIENDS), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a professional career.

  • Girls at 12

    Episode 4

    Made by Joyce Chopra in 1975 for the Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts, as part of the program The Role of Women in American Society, GIRLS AT 12 looks at the lives of three girls growing up near Boston in order to show the complexities of becoming a teenager in the midseventi...

  • Daguerréotypes

    Episode 5

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1975 • France
    Starring Lucien Bossy, Léonce Debrossian, Marcelle Debrossian

    Spending most of her days at home following the birth of her son but curious as ever about the people and places that surrounded her, Agnès Varda found inspiration for DAGUERRÉOTYPES just outsid...

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

    Episode 6

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
    Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

    A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...

  • News from Home

    Episode 7

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

    Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

  • Clorae and Albie

    Episode 8

    Made by Joyce Chopra in 1976 for the Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts, as part of the program The Role of Women in American Society, CLORAE AND ALBIE focuses on two young Black women who have been best friends since childhood but whose lives are taking different paths.

  • Mur Murs

    Episode 9

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1981 • France

    After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city. Bursting with color and vitality, MUR MURS is as much an invigorating study of community and diversity ...

  • A Girl’s Own Story

    Episode 10

    Directed by Jane Campion • 1983 • Australia

    This early short from director Jane Campion concerns a group of teenage girls in the 1960s.

  • Jane B. par Agnès V.

    Episode 11

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1988 • France
    Starring Jane Birkin, Agnès Varda, Charlotte Gainsbourg

    The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a ye...

  • Sweetie

    Episode 12

    Directed by Jane Campion • 1989 • New Zealand
    Starring Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos

    Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature SWEETIE, which focuses on the hazardous relationship between the button...

  • Odds and Ends

    Episode 13

    Directed by Michelle Parkerson • 1993 • United States

    In the year 2096, Black women warriors wage a battle against racial and gender annihilation. In this devastated universe, a fable unfolds on the interplanetary frontlines. Lieutenant Loz Wayard, a courageous young Amazon, learns the price of ...

  • Angela

    Episode 14

    Directed by Rebecca Miller • 1995 • United States
    Starring Miranda Rhyne, Charlotte Eve Blythe

    Rebecca Miller’s spellbinding debut feature is a searing portrait of a ten-year-old girl (Miranda Rhyne) who—as her mentally ill mother’s sanity deteriorates—retreats into a disturbing imaginative univ...

  • Beau travail

    Episode 15

    Directed by Claire Denis • 1999 • France
    Starring Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin

    With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked ...

  • Conversations with Intellectuals About Selena

    Episode 16

    Directed by Lourdes Portillo • 1999 • United States

    Interrogating the Selena phenomenon, Lourdes Portillo brings together a group of Chicana cultural critics to talk about the Tejana music icon. Delving into their reactions to Selena’s groundbreaking rise, widespread influence, and tragic death,...

  • La captive

    Episode 17

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2000 • Belgium, France
    Starring Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar, Olivia Bonamy

    Adapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Chantal Akerman transforms the material into a mesmerizing study of voyeurism, control, and sexual obsession centere...

  • Tomboy

    Episode 18

    Directed by Céline Sciamma • 2011 • France
    Starring Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson

    TOMBOY tells the story of ten-year-old Laure (played by the amazing Zoé Héran) who moves to the suburbs and decides to pass as a boy among the pack of neighborhood kids. As “Mickäel” she catches the atten...

  • Swimmer

    Episode 19

    Directed by Lynne Ramsay • 2012 • United Kingdom
    Starring Tom Litten

    Stunning monochrome cinematography and impressionistic sound design turn a young man’s aquatic odyssey into a ravishing sensory experience.

  • Social Butterfly

    Episode 20

    Directed by Lauren Wolkstein • 2013 • France
    Starring Anna Margaret Hollyman, Camille Claris, Ulysse Grosjean

    A thirty-year-old American woman crashes a teenage party in the South of France, leading the guests to wonder who she is and what she is doing there.

  • Roberta

    Episode 21

    Directed by Caroline Monnet • 2014 • Canada
    Starring Marie Brassard, Julien Morin

    Housewife and grandmother Roberta struggles to fit into the conformist society in which she lives and turns to amphetamines to cure her boredom in this short produced by Microclimat Films.

  • Let the Sunshine In

    Episode 22

    Directed by Claire Denis • 2017 • France
    Starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Philippe Katerine

    Two luminaries of French cinema, Claire Denis and Juliette Binoche, unite for the first time in this piercing look at the elusive nature of true love, and the extent to which we are willing to ...

  • I Dream You Dream of Me

    Episode 23

    Directed by Jennifer Reeder • 2018 • United States
    Starring Angelica Ross

    A lone woman marks her trail and sheds some excess baggage along the way in this feminist western-meets-horror fever dream.

  • Moving
    08:08
    Episode 24

    Moving

    Episode 24

    Directed by Adinah Dancyger • 2019 • United States
    Starring Hannah Gross

    One woman’s Sisyphean attempt to transport an old mattress into a new walk-up apartment is transformed into a feat of absurdist cinematic choreography in this wordless, gracefully contained and conceived vignette full of hu...