Women Filmmakers
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The Beaches of Agnès
Movie + 5 extras
Directed by Agnès Varda • 2008 • France
Starring Agnès Varda“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting auto-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey...
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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...
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Written by Dorothy Parker
1 season
With a wit as dry as the martinis she famously loved, celebrated writer Dorothy Parker was a legend of the Jazz Age New York intelligentsia. Less well remembered is the time she spent in Hollywood as a screenwriter, where she brought her bitingly satirical voice and gift for delightfully dagger-l...
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Mikey and Nicky
Movie + 6 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #957
Directed by Elaine May • 1976 • United States
Starring Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned BeattyElaine May crafted a gangster film like no other in the nocturnal odyssey MIKEY AND NICKY, capitalizing on the chemistry between frequent collaborators John Cassavete...
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The Lure
Movie + 9 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #896
Directed by Agnieska Smoczyńska • 2015 • Poland
Starring Kinga Preis, Michalina Olszańska, Marta MazurekThis genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore ...
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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 RaffiIn 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...
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Certain Women
Movie + 3 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #893
Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2016 • United States
Starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle WilliamsThe expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile M...
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Desert Hearts
Movie + 7 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #902
Directed by Donna Deitch • 1985 • United States
Starring Helen Shaver, Patricia CharbonneauDonna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely inde...
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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...
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Nightshift
Movie
Directed by Robina Rose • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Jordan, Anne Rees-Mogg, Mitch DA 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...
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My Brilliant Career
Movie + 5 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #973
Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
Starring Judy Davis, Sam NeillFor her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-ag...
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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...
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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...
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The Sealed Soil
Movie
Directed by Marva Nabili • 1977 • Iran
Starring Flora ShabavizThe earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL chronicles the resistance of a young woman (Flora Shabavis) to her forced marriage, a defiance quickly misinterpreted by her fa...
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Compensation
Movie + 10 extras
Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana CobbA poignant portrait of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of love at both ends of the twentieth century, Zeinabu irene Davis’s film is a groundbreaking story of inclusion and...
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Vermiglio
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Maura Delpero • 2024 • Italy, France, Belgium
Starring Giuseppe De Domenico, Tommaso Ragno, Martina ScrinziSecrets 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...
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Between the Lines
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1977 • United States
Starring John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff GoldblumInspired by director Joan Micklin Silver’s time working at New York’s storied alt weekly the “Village Voice,” this unsung gem of 1970s slice-of-life seriocomedy offers an incisive, bitterswe...
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Double Happiness
Movie
Directed by Mina Shum • 1994 • Canada
Starring Sandra Oh, Stephen Chang, Alannah OngAn 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...
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Fresh Kill
Movie
Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham LimA disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an ...
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Daughters of the Dust
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Julie Dash • 1991 • United States
Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones
Julie Dash’s rapturous vision of black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a wide release. In ... -
Thank You and Good Night
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Jan Oxenberg • 1991 • United States
A lost-and-found revelation from indie film and TV maverick Jan Oxenberg is a docu-fantasy narrative focused on the filmmaker’s hilarious, messy, Jewish family as they prepare to say goodbye to someone they love. Narrated by a cardboard cutout of O...
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Three Short Films by Ja’Tovia Gary
1 season
The aesthetically dynamic, shape-shifting films of artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary combine everything from heavily processed 16 mm archival materials to TikTok videos and woman-on-the-street-style interviews to put Black women and their lived experiences, past and present, in dialogue with one...
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Harlan County USA
Movie + 12 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #334
Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ somet...
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Sweetie
Movie + 6 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #356
Directed by Jane Campion • 1989 • New Zealand
Starring Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom LycosThough 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 hazard...