Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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. ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Me and You and Everyone We Know

    Movie + 6 extras

    Directed by Miranda July • 2005 • United States
    Starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson

    With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange—an original vision of creativ...

  • Bergman Island
    Movie + 3 extras

    Bergman Island

    Movie + 3 extras

    Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • 2021 • France
    Starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska

    Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve embarks on a luminous summertime odyssey to the home of Ingmar Bergman for her seventh feature, a graceful, shape-shifting tale about the interplay of life and art and the ...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • Fresh Kill

    Movie

    Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
    Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim

    A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an ...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Nightshift

    Movie

    Directed by Robina Rose • 1981 • United Kingdom
    Starring Jordan, Anne Rees-Mogg, Mitch D

    A 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Sara 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...

  • 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...