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.
In this program, female directors, cinematographers, and actors discuss their work.
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.
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...
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...
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 ...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Letters from Chantal Akerman's mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman's unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditati...
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.
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 ...
Directed by Jane Campion • 1983 • Australia
This early short from director Jane Campion concerns a group of teenage girls in the 1960s.
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Directed by Maria Maggenti • 1995 • United States
Starring Laurel Holloman, Nicole Ari Parker, Maggie Moore
Breaking new ground in queer representation when it was released in 1995, this tender and charming tale of first love traces the tentative relationship that develops between two high-schoo...
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 ...
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,...
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...
Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2008 • Argentina
Starring María Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Inés Efron
A bourgeois middle-aged dentist named Verónica (María Onetto) drives alone on a dirt road, becomes distracted, and runs over something. Immediately she becomes disoriented, unmoored from her identit...
Directed by Alexis Krasilovsky • 2008 • United States
Featuring more than fifty camerawomen from around the world, Alexis Krasilovsky’s SHOOTING WOMEN celebrates the amazing talent and unflinching spirit of image-making women from the sets of Hollywood and Bollywood to the war zones of Afghanist...
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...
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.
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.
