Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • My Brilliant Career
    Movie + 5 extras

    My Brilliant Career

    Movie + 5 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #973

    Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
    Starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill

    For 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...