Women Filmmakers
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1 seasonDirected 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 ...
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MovieThe Babadook
Movie
Directed by Jennifer Kent • 2014 • Australia
Starring Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel HenshallAn 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...
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1 seasonRebels 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...
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Movie + 2 extrasNot a Pretty Picture
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Martha Coolidge • 1975 • United States
Starring Michele Manenti, Jim Carrington, Anne MundstukTrailblazing 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...
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Movie + 1 extraVariety
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Bette Gordon • 1983 • United States
Starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. DavidsonThe 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. ...
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Movie + 1 extraMary 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 SpoonsThe 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...
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MovieAlma Punk
Movie
Directed by Sarah Minter • 1991 • Mexico
Starring Ciro Basilio, Ana Hernandez, Marco PavonAlma (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...
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Movie + 4 extrasGirlfight
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Karyn Kusama • 2000 • United States
Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul CalderonBullied 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...
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MovieGirlhood
Movie
Directed by Céline Sciamma • 2014 • France
Starring Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay KaramohFed 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...
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Movie + 1 extraOld Boyfriends
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Joan Tewkesbury • 1979 • United States
Starring Talia Shire, Richard Jordan, Keith CarradineThe 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 ...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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Movie + 3 extrasBergman Island
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • 2021 • France
Starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia WasikowskaWriter-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 ...
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MovieOur 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...
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MovieOur Father, the Devil
Movie
Directed by Ellie Foumbi • 2021 • United States
Starring Babetida Sadjo, Souleymane Sy Savane, Jennifer TchiakpeEllie 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. ...
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1 seasonDirected 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’...
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1 seasonDirected 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, ...
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MoviePlan 75
Movie
Directed by Chie Hayakawa • 2022 • Japan, Philippines
Starring Chieko Baisho, Hayato Isomura, Stefanie ArianneIn 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 ...
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Movie + 6 extrasFarewell Amor
Movie + 6 extras
Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme LawsonIn 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...
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1 seasonDirected by Lina Rodriguez
1 season
The search for identity is at the core of Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodriguez’s intimate, richly impressionistic films. Informed by her own immigrant experience, her narrative features like SO MUCH TENDERNESS and THIS TIME TOMORROW and her acclaimed documentary MY TWO VOICES capture women ...
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Movie + 8 extrasDrylongso
Movie + 8 extras
Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will PowerA rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s DRYLONGSO embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rat...