Women Filmmakers

Women Filmmakers

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Women Filmmakers
  • Desert Hearts
    Movie + 7 extras

    Desert Hearts

    Movie + 7 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #902

    Directed by Donna Deitch • 1985 • United States
    Starring Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau

    Donna Deitch's swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, made entirely inde...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Sambizanga
    Movie + 2 extras

    Sambizanga

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Sarah Maldoror • 1972 • Angola
    Starring Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M’Vondo

    This 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • The Lure
    Movie + 9 extras

    The Lure

    Movie + 9 extras

    Criterion Collection Edition #896

    Directed by Agnieska Smoczyńska • 2015 • Poland
    Starring Kinga Preis, Michalina Olszańska, Marta Mazurek

    This genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore ...

  • 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...

  • Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

    Movie

    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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Double Happiness

    Movie

    Directed by Mina Shum • 1994 • Canada
    Starring Sandra Oh, Stephen Chang, Alannah Ong

    An irresistible, star-making performance from Sandra Oh lights up this warm, sharp-witted look at what it means to hold onto heritage while forging one’s own identity. She stars as Jade, a young Chinese Canadian...

  • 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...

  • 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...