Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • Two Revolutionary Films by Heiny Srour

    1 season

    Spotlighting the role of women in Arab revolutionary movements, the extraordinary films of Lebanese director Heiny Srour are long overdue for rediscovery. For THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, Srour weathered the dangers of an active conflict zone to document an Omani anticolonialist uprising i...

  • Hero
    Movie

    Hero

    Movie

    Directed by Sylvia Chang, Joan Chen, and Li Shaohong • 2022 • China
    Starring Zhou Xun, Sammi Cheng, Jackson Yee

    A trio of China’s leading women filmmakers—Sylvia Chang, Joan Chen, and Li Shaohong—join forces for this three-part anthology about women navigating a new world of uncertainty amid the...

  • Three by Kathryn Bigelow

    1 season

    Kathryn Bigelow’s early films are bracing fusions of kinetic genre thrills and potent social critique, probing cultural anxieties and questions of identity with style and intelligence to burn. THE LOVELESS, her assured directorial debut, is a reinvention of the road movie, blending existential de...

  • Toute une nuit

    Movie

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1982 • Belgium, France
    Starring Aurore Clément, Tchéky Karyo, Jan Decorte

    A hot summer evening in Brussels: couples dance in bars and cafés, part outside homes, or escape together under the darkness of night; some discover or reignite romance, some end it, while sti...

  • Joonam

    Movie

    Directed by Sierra Urich • 2023 • United States

    In this moving first-person documentary, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity. Having grown up in rural Vermont, far removed from the homeland of her mother, Mitra, and ...

  • Directed by Joyce Chopra

    1 season

    Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...

  • Petite Solange

    Movie

    Directed by Axelle Ropert • 2021 • France
    Starring Jade Springer, Léa Drucker, Philippe Katerine

    Taking a child’s-eye view of a disintegrating family, director Axelle Ropert offers a supremely sensitive, richly layered reimagining of the divorce drama. Solange (Jade Springer, in a revelatory per...

  • Sara Gómez’s Revolutionary Cuba

    1 season

    A true cinematic revolutionary who used the camera as her tool in the fight against oppression in all forms, the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez brought the stories of ordinary Cubans to the screen with a bracing immediacy and insight. Drawing on her background in ethnography, Gómez became her co...

  • Directed by Joan Micklin Silver

    1 season

    One of the greatest American filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, Joan Micklin Silver drew on her background as the daughter of Russian-born Jewish parents to write and direct beautifully bittersweet portraits of women, immigrants, and marginalized communities. With profound empathy, her films vivi...

  • Directed by Axelle Ropert

    1 season

    One of contemporary French cinema’s most intriguing auteurs, Axelle Ropert employs an alchemical blend of narrative classicism and subtle expressionism to create nuanced explorations of human relationships and the division between the worlds of children and adults. Particularly concerned with the...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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’...

  • 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...