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...
Forlorn fish express their alienation through song, a pair of pigeons visit a zoo without animals, and a lonely fox has an enigmatic encounter with the new rabbit next door—welcome to the startlingly surreal, delicately bittersweet world of Swedish stop-motion animator Niki Lindroth von Bahr, who...
Directed by Sally Potter • 1983 • United Kingdom
Starring Julie Christie, Colette Laffont, Hilary Westlake
Made with an all-woman crew, Sally Potter’s bold feature debut is a surrealist science-fiction musical that explores the link between female cinematic representation and capitalist exploita...
The director of the audacious festival hit LEMON and the critically acclaimed ZOLA, Janicza Bravo cultivates the unsettling, the absurd, and the hilariously warped. This selection of four of her brilliantly outré shorts—including the award-winning dark comedy GREGORY GO BOOM, starring Michael Cer...
Montreal-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Caroline Monnet combines striking, often abstract visuals and evocative soundscapes to explore Indigenous identity, the reverberations of colonialism, and hidden cultural histories. Encompassing an inspiring portrait of a Chippewa mixed martial artis...
One of contemporary cinema’s most singular and captivating voices, Jane Campion brings a piercing psychological insight and radiantly expressive visual style to her intense, revelatory explorations of female subjectivity and desire. After winning critical acclaim for her first two theatrical feat...
Filmmaker and artist Elisabeth Subrin has long explored female subjectivity and representation through her formally restless, conceptually driven shorts, which include tributes to photographer Francesca Woodman and actor Maria Schneider. With the arresting character study A WOMAN, A PART, Subrin ...
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...
Directed by Lynne Sachs • 2020 • United States
Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO ...
Directed by Marin Håskjold • 2020 • Norway
Starring Mina Alette Høvik, Eva Johansson, Louise Löwenberg
A discussion occurs in a women’s locker room when someone asks a transgender woman to leave. Tackling complex issues head-on in a frank, naturalistic style, Norwegian director Marin Håskjold ex...
Trailblazing writer and director Lois Weber combined technical mastery, creative control, and thematic daring to become arguably the first auteur in film history. Tackling controversial subjects such as sex work and birth control, Weber put forward a strikingly personal, ahead-of-its-time vision ...
The foremost pioneer of silhouette animation, German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger brought enchanting storybook worlds to life through her intricate cutouts and groundbreaking use of a proto-multiplane camera that she developed a decade before the technique was made famous by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks...
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger • 1981 • West Germany
Starring Magdalena Montezuma, Delphine Seyrig, Albert Heins
Ulrike Ottinger transforms Virginia Woolf’s queer feminist classic ORLANDO into an outrageous camp spectacle in which a gender-fluid time traveler (Magdalena Montezuma) zigzags across hi...
For Michelle Parkerson, filmmaking and activism are inextricably entwined. Using her camera to bring untold stories of Black and queer female identity to the screen as a producer and director, Parkerson has profiled trailblazing performers and activists such as influential jazz singer Betty Carte...
Directed by Valeska Grisebach • 2017 • Germany
Starring Meinhard Neumann, Reinhardt Wetrek, Syuleyman Alilov Letifov
Valeska Grisebach’s intense, slow-burning thriller follows a group of German construction workers installing a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria. The foreign land awakens the ...
Directed by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik • 2017 • Poland
Starring Agnieszka Mandat, Wiktor Zborowski, Jakub Gierszal
Mysterious, atmospheric, and darkly humorous, this genre-defying adaptation of Nobel Prize–winning writer Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead”...
Directed by Lynne Ramsay • 2012 • United Kingdom
Starring Tom Litten
Stunning monochrome cinematography and impressionistic sound design turn a young man’s aquatic odyssey into a ravishing sensory experience.
Directed by Ng’endo Mukii • 2012 • United Kingdom, Kenya
What does beauty look like? In this award-winning short, Kenyan filmmaker Ng’endo Mukii combines animation, performance, and experimental techniques to create a visually arresting and psychologically penetrating exploration of the insidiou...
Directed by Halina Dyrschka • 2019 • Germany
Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange...
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 Naima Ramos-Chapman • 2016 • United States
Starring Naima Ramos-Chapman, Angela Silverio, Bianca Soto
A young woman dealing with the psychological aftermath of sexual violence shuffles between experiences both mundane and extraordinary as she attempts to leave her New York City apart...
David Lynch meets John Hughes in the surreally sinister teenage dreams of Jennifer Reeder. Evoking the inner worlds of adolescent girls and women at moments of crisis and transformation, she combines hallucinatory Day-Glo visuals, moody synthscapes, and deliberately kitschy touches—DIY props, tal...
One of the leaders of the LA Rebellion movement that rumbled forth from the UCLA Film School in the 1970s, Julie Dash became the first Black American woman to have a feature widely released with her stunning, dreamlike DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST. Made between 1975 and 2016, these remarkable short film...
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...
