Women Filmmakers
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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 RaffiIn 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...
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Drylongso
Movie + 8 extras
Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will PowerA 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...
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La Ciénaga
Movie + 4 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #743
Directed by Lucrecia Martel • 2001 • Argentina
Starring Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora BalcarceThe 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...
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Fresh Kill
Movie
Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham LimA 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 ...
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Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
Movie
Directed by Lili Horvát • 2020 • Hungary
Starring Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodó, Benett VilmányiThe 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...
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Born in Flames
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean SatterfieldA blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...
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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 ... -
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...
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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...
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Compensation
Movie + 10 extras
Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana CobbA 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...
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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...
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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...
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Between the Lines
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1977 • United States
Starring John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff GoldblumInspired 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...
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Female Perversions
Movie
Directed by Susan Streitfeld • 1996 • United States, Germany
Starring Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen SillasIn 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 ...
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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...
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Mikey and Nicky
Movie + 6 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #957
Directed by Elaine May • 1976 • United States
Starring Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned BeattyElaine May crafted a gangster film like no other in the nocturnal odyssey MIKEY AND NICKY, capitalizing on the chemistry between frequent collaborators John Cassavete...
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Variety
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Bette Gordon • 1983 • United States
Starring Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Richard M. DavidsonThe 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. ...
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Certain Women
Movie + 3 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #893
Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2016 • United States
Starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle WilliamsThe expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile M...
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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...
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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...
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Bergman Island
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • 2021 • France
Starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia WasikowskaWriter-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 ...
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Wanda
Movie + 6 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #965
Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden, Michael HigginsWith 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...
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7 Films by Suzan Pitt
1 season
Enter the wild and wondrous world of the late Suzan Pitt, an independent animation visionary whose oneiric psychosexual odysseys are direct channels to her dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and inner desires. Straining a diverse array of influences—from Leonora Carrington to Betty Boop to magical re...
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Vermiglio
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Maura Delpero • 2024 • Italy, France, Belgium
Starring Giuseppe De Domenico, Tommaso Ragno, Martina ScrinziSecrets 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...