Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • La Ciénaga
    Movie + 4 extras

    La Ciénaga

    Movie + 4 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #743

    Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2001 • Argentina
    Starring Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora Balcarce

    The release of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturb...

  • Fresh Kill

    Movie

    Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
    Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim

    A 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 ...

  • Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

    Movie

    Directed by Lili Horvát • 2020 • Hungary
    Starring Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodó, Benett Vilmányi

    The second feature by Hungarian director Lili Horvát is a slippery, seductive investigation of memory, obsession, and delusion. After twenty years in the United States, Hungarian neurosurgeon Márta (Nata...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Compensation
    Movie + 10 extras

    Compensation

    Movie + 10 extras

    Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
    Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb

    A 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...

  • 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...

  • The Beaches of Agnès
    Movie + 5 extras

    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...

  • Between the Lines
    Movie + 1 extra

    Between the Lines

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1977 • United States
    Starring John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum

    Inspired 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • Mikey and Nicky
    Movie + 6 extras

    Mikey and Nicky

    Movie + 6 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #957

    Directed by Elaine May • 1976 • United States
    Starring Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty

    Elaine May crafted a gangster film like no other in the nocturnal odyssey MIKEY AND NICKY, capitalizing on the chemistry between frequent collaborators John Cassavete...

  • 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. ...

  • Certain Women
    Movie + 3 extras

    Certain Women

    Movie + 3 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #893

    Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2016 • United States
    Starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams

    The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile M...

  • 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...

  • Smithereens
    Movie + 7 extras

    Smithereens

    Movie + 7 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #941

    Directed by Susan Seidelman • 1982 • United States

    Susan Seidelman established her distinctive vision of New York City with this debut feature, the lo-fi original for her vibrant portraits of women reinventing themselves. After escaping New Jersey, the quintess...

  • 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 ...

  • Wanda
    Movie + 6 extras

    Wanda

    Movie + 6 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #965

    Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
    Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins

    With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bri...

  • 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...

  • 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...