Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Directed by Catherine Breillat

    1 season

    Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-ag...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • I Am Not a Witch

    Movie

    Directed by Rungano Nyoni • 2017 • Zambia, United Kingdom
    Starring Maggie Mulubwa, Nellie Munamonga, Dyna Mufuni

    The acclaimed debut feature from Rungano Nyoni is a daring, sharply satiric feminist fairy tale set in present-day Zambia. When nine-year-old orphan Shula (Margaret Mulubwa) is accuse...

  • Trouble Every Day

    Movie

    Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
    Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle

    Claire Denis’s poetic take on the body-horror genre is an atmospheric reverie of blood and lust that lays bare the filmmaker’s core artistic concerns around power, desire, and delirium. Newlyweds Shane...

  • The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

    Movie

    Directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich • 2024 • United States
    Starring Zita Hanrot, Motell Gyn Foster, Josué Gutierrez

    A sumptuous, spellbinding anti-biopic as provocative and elusive as its subject, this hypnotic journey through the world of Caribbean surrealist writer and anticolonial activist Suz...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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 ...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...