Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • Wolf’s Hole

    Movie

    Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1987 • Czechoslovakia
    Starring Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka Cervenková

    Věra Chytilová’s subversive take on the 1980s teen-horror movie assembles a gaggle of bratty adolescents for a mysterious skiing retreat at a snowbound cabin where they find themselve...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Drylongso
    Movie + 8 extras

    Drylongso

    Movie + 8 extras

    Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
    Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power

    A 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...

  • 7 Films by Suzan Pitt

    1 season

    Enter the wild and wondrous world of the late Suzan Pitt, an independent animation visionary whose oneiric psychosexual odysseys are direct channels to her dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and inner desires. Straining a diverse array of influences—from Leonora Carrington to Betty Boop to magical re...

  • The Competition

    Movie

    Directed by Claire Simon • 2016 • France

    Every year, a mere forty students are selected from hundreds of applicants to study at Paris’s La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world. Following in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon (OUR BODY) observes the process w...

  • The Night Porter
    Movie + 3 extras

    The Night Porter

    Movie + 3 extras

    Directed by Liliana Cavani • 1974 • Italy
    Starring Charlotte Rampling, Dirk Bogarde

    In this unsettling drama from Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani, a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her former torturer and lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a porter at a hotel in postwar ...

  • Harlan County USA
    Movie + 12 extras

    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...

  • Hooligan Sparrow

    Movie

    Directed by Nanfu Wang • 2016 • China, United States

    A work of startling courage that had to be smuggled out of China, Nanfu Wang’s gripping documentary captures the palpable danger as she follows maverick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a. Hooligan Sparrow) and her band of colleagues to Hainan Province...

  • It Felt Like Love
    Movie + 1 extra

    It Felt Like Love

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Eliza Hittman • 2013 • United States
    Starring Gina Piersanti, Jesse Cordasco, Giovanna Salimeni

    Set over the course of a languid South Brooklyn summer, this unflinchingly honest, refreshingly unsentimental tale of sexual exploration and awakening—the revelatory feature debut from wri...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • Loving Highsmith

    Movie

    Directed by Eva Vitija • 2022 • Germany, Switzerland
    Starring Gwendoline Christie, Annina Butterworth, Marijane Meaker

    The life and work of celebrated American writer Patricia Highsmith are revealed through her diaries and notebooks and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends, and family...

  • 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...

  • Working Girls
    Movie + 4 extras

    Working Girls

    Movie + 4 extras

    Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1986 • United States
    Starring Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin

    Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experience...

  • Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Leslie Harris • 1992 • United States
    Starring Ariyan A. Johnson, Kevin Thigpen, Ebony Jerido

    Leslie Harris’s indie touchstone made a splash when it won a special jury prize at Sundance in 1993, offering a window into a world still sorely underrepresented in mainstream cinema: that of...

  • Variety
    Movie + 1 extra

    Variety

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Bette Gordon • 1983 • United States
    Starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. Davidson

    The 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. ...

  • Smooth Talk
    Movie + 10 extras

    Smooth Talk

    Movie + 10 extras

    Directed by Joyce Chopra • 1985 • United States
    Starring Laura Dern, Treat Williams, Mary Kay Place

    Suspended between carefree youth and the harsh realities of the adult world, a teenage girl experiences an unsettling awakening in this haunting vision of innocence lost. Based on Joyce Carol Oate...

  • Directed by Nancy Savoca

    1 season

    Graced with warmth, sensitivity, and indelible, richly realized characters, the films of Nancy Savoca eloquently evoke the inner worlds of women who challenge patriarchal norms in their quests to define themselves. Both built around luminous performances from Lili Taylor as young women on complex...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...