Women Filmmakers
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Movie + 5 extrasMy 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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1 seasonDirected 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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Movie + 7 extrasSmithereens
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...
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Movie + 2 extrasSambizanga
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Sarah Maldoror • 1972 • Angola
Starring Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M’VondoThis 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...
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1 seasonShort Films by Sophy Romvari
1 season
With her acclaimed debut feature, the heartbreaking family portrait BLUE HERON (in theaters this April), Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari builds on her early short works to reveal an astonishing cinematic sensibility exquisitely attuned to the delicate, sensory details that shape experience. Freq...
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Movie + 6 extrasWanda
Movie + 6 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #965
Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden, Michael HigginsWith 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...
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1 season7 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...
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1 seasonThree 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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MovieAlma’s Rainbow
Movie
Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1994 • United States
Starring Kim Weston-Moran, Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Mizan NunesA rediscovered treasure of independent cinema, this incisive comedic drama follows Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), a teenager coming of age in Brooklyn, as she looks to two...
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MovieToute une nuit
Movie
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1982 • Belgium, France
Starring Aurore Clément, Tchéky Karyo, Jan DecorteA 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...
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MovieWolf’s Hole
Movie
Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1987 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka CervenkováVěra 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...
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1 seasonSara 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...
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1 seasonMárta 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...
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Movie + 5 extrasMississippi Masala
Movie + 5 extras
Directed by Mira Nair • 1991 • United States, Uganda
Starring Denzel Washington, Sarita Choudhury, Roshan SethThe 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...
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Movie + 6 extrasOne 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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Movie + 2 extrasNot a Pretty Picture
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Martha Coolidge • 1975 • United States
Starring Michele Manenti, Jim Carrington, Anne MundstukTrailblazing 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...
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MovieNightshift
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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Movie + 2 extrasBorn in Flames
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean SatterfieldA 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...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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Movie + 2 extrasVermiglio
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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1 seasonTwo 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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1 seasonShort Films by Onyeka Igwe
1 season
Playful, absorbing, and deeply inquisitive, the films of Onyeka Igwe turn to the archives to challenge official narratives and excavate hidden histories. Whether tracing fragments of her own family history in THE NAMES HAVE CHANGED, INCLUDING MY OWN AND TRUTHS HAVE BEEN ALTERED, reimagining antic...
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1 seasonDirected 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...
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Movie + 2 extrasAll We Imagine as Light
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2024 • France, India, Netherlands
Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya KadamPayal Kapadia’s acclaimed fiction-feature debut is a radiant ode to hope-giving connections forged amid big-city anonymity. Set against the hypnotic luminescence of Mumbai, ALL WE IMAG...