Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • 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...

  • Smithereens
    Movie + 6 extras

    Smithereens

    Movie + 6 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Drylongso
    Movie + 8 extras

    Drylongso

    Movie + 8 extras

    Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
    Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power

    A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s DRYLONGSO embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rat...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • Written by Dorothy Parker

    1 season

    With a wit as dry as the martinis she famously loved, celebrated writer Dorothy Parker was a legend of the Jazz Age New York intelligentsia. Less well remembered is the time she spent in Hollywood as a screenwriter, where she brought her bitingly satirical voice and gift for delightfully dagger-l...

  • 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 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...