Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • Directed by Monika Treut

    1 season

    Ever since her daring debut feature, the fearlessly transgressive S&M exploration SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN, Monika Treut has been at the forefront of queer cinema, illuminating LGBTQ+ lives with subversive wit, uncompromising honesty, and compassionate insight. Fiercely controversial in her nat...

  • July Rhapsody

    Movie

    Directed by Ann Hui • 2002 • Hong Kong
    Starring Jacky Cheung, Anita Mui, Karena Lam

    Brimming with serene, ineffable beauty, JULY RHAPSODY is a profound and soothing tale from Hong Kong auteur Ann Hui (BOAT PEOPLE) about paddling through life’s chaos—even as things that seem eternal, like the Yan...

  • Márta Mészáros’s Diary Trilogy

    1 season

    With her extraordinary Diary Trilogy, trailblazing Hungarian auteur Márta Mészáros fused the personal and the political, entwining her country’s turbulent post–World War II history with a heartrending story drawn from her own life experiences. Tracing the journey of a strong-willed orphan named J...

  • Heart of a Dog
    Movie + 6 extras

    Heart of a Dog

    Movie + 6 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #846

    Directed by Laurie Anderson • 2015 • United States

    HEART OF A DOG marks the first feature film in thirty years by multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. A cinematic tone poem that flows from a sustained meditation on death and other forms of absence, the film seaml...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Double Happiness

    Movie

    Directed by Mina Shum • 1994 • Canada
    Starring Sandra Oh, Stephen Chang, Alannah Ong

    An irresistible, star-making performance from Sandra Oh lights up this warm, sharp-witted look at what it means to hold onto heritage while forging one’s own identity. She stars as Jade, a young Chinese Canadian...

  • The Lure
    Movie + 9 extras

    The Lure

    Movie + 9 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #896

    Directed by Agnieska Smoczyńska • 2015 • Poland
    Starring Kinga Preis, Michalina Olszańska, Marta Mazurek

    This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore ...

  • Vermiglio
    Movie + 2 extras

    Vermiglio

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Maura Delpero • 2024 • Italy, France, Belgium
    Starring Giuseppe De Domenico, Tommaso Ragno, Martina Scrinzi

    Secrets swirl beneath the surface of a remote Italian community in Maura Delpero’s exquisite wartime drama, winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. In a majestic...

  • Born in Flames
    Movie + 2 extras

    Born in Flames

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
    Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield

    A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...

  • Nightshift

    Movie

    Directed by Robina Rose • 1981 • United Kingdom
    Starring Jordan, Anne Rees-Mogg, Mitch D

    A gorgeously photographed work of surreal, somnambulant cinema, Robina Rose’s singular snapshot of London’s early 1980s art scene casts a hypnotic spell all its own. Over the course of a single nightshift, a...

  • Female Perversions

    Movie

    Directed by Susan Streitfeld • 1996 • United States, Germany
    Starring Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas

    In her stunning American film debut, the singularly arresting, chameleonic Tilda Swinton stars as Eve Stephens, a ruthless, bisexual Los Angeles lawyer on the edge. As she struggles to ...

  • Two Shorts by Sofía Camargo

    1 season

    The complex dynamics between mothers and daughters is at the heart of these beautifully understated shorts by Colombian director Sofía Camargo. In BY THE RIVER, an unspoken grief hovers in the household of a newly single mother and her two daughters, while in NOSTOS, a young girl acts out in defi...

  • All We Imagine as Light

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2024 • France, India, Netherlands
    Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam

    Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction-feature debut is a radiant ode to hope-giving connections forged amid big-city anonymity. Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, ALL WE IMAG...

  • Mississippi Masala
    Movie + 5 extras

    Mississippi Masala

    Movie + 5 extras

    Directed by Mira Nair • 1991 • United States, Uganda
    Starring Denzel Washington, Sarita Choudhury, Roshan Seth

    The vibrant cultures of India, Uganda, and the American South come together in Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA, a luminous look at the complexities of love in the modern melting pot. Yea...

  • Directed by Maya Deren

    1 season

    The barrier between waking and dreaming dissolves in the ecstatic, trancelike films of Maya Deren, a legend of the avant-garde who rewrote the rules of cinema in the name of uncompromising personal expression. Combining symbol-laden imagery, intricately choreographed camera movements, time- and s...

  • 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...

  • Three by Mai Zetterling

    1 season

    A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent...

  • Sambizanga
    Movie + 2 extras

    Sambizanga

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Sarah Maldoror • 1972 • Angola
    Starring Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M’Vondo

    This revolutionary bombshell by Sarah Maldoror chronicles the awakening of Angola’s independence movement. Based on a true story, SAMBIZANGA follows a young woman as she makes her way from the o...

  • One Sings, the Other Doesn’t

    Movie + 6 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #978

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1977 • France
    Starring Valérie Mairesse, Thérèse Liotard, Ali Raffi

    In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme len...

  • De Lo Mio
    Movie + 1 extra

    De Lo Mio

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Diana Peralta • 2019 • United States
    Starring Sasha Merci, Darlene Demorizi, Héctor Aníbal

    Sibling bonds are both rekindled and tested in the achingly alive feature debut from Diana Peralta. Rita (Sasha Merci) and Carolina (Darlene Demorizi), two high-spirited sisters raised in New Y...

  • Alma’s Rainbow

    Movie

    Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1994 • United States
    Starring Kim Weston-Moran, Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Mizan Nunes

    A rediscovered treasure of independent cinema, this incisive comedic drama follows Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), a teenager coming of age in Brooklyn, as she looks to two...

  • 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...

  • Directed by Kira Muratova

    1 season

    Few filmmakers have forged a voice as singular and uncategorizable as that of Ukrainian iconoclast Kira Muratova. Working on the margins of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, she withstood decades of censorship to realize her uncompromising vision in fascinatingly fragmented, expressionistically heig...