Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • The Sealed Soil

    Movie

    Directed by Marva Nabili • 1977 • Iran
    Starring Flora Shabaviz

    The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL chronicles the resistance of a young woman (Flora Shabavis) to her forced marriage, a defiance quickly misinterpreted by her fa...

  • 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...

  • Girlfight
    Movie + 4 extras

    Girlfight

    Movie + 4 extras

    Directed by Karyn Kusama • 2000 • United States
    Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul Calderon

    Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she lea...

  • Sweetie
    Movie + 6 extras

    Sweetie

    Movie + 6 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #356

    Directed by Jane Campion • 1989 • New Zealand
    Starring Genevieve Lemon, Karen Colston, Tom Lycos

    Though she went on to create a string of brilliant films, Jane Campion will always be remembered for her stunning debut feature SWEETIE, which focuses on the hazard...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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. ...

  • 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...

  • All We Imagine as Light

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2024 • France, India, Netherlands
    Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam

    Payal 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Short 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...

  • Toute une nuit

    Movie

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1982 • Belgium, France
    Starring Aurore Clément, Tchéky Karyo, Jan Decorte

    A 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Directed 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Three 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...

  • Two 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...

  • Alma’s Rainbow

    Movie

    Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1994 • United States
    Starring Kim Weston-Moran, Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Mizan Nunes

    A 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...

  • 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...