Women Filmmakers
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Nightshift
Movie
Directed by Robina Rose • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Jordan, Anne Rees-Mogg, Mitch DA 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...
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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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Double Happiness
Movie
Directed by Mina Shum • 1994 • Canada
Starring Sandra Oh, Stephen Chang, Alannah OngAn 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...
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Smooth Talk
Movie + 10 extras
Directed by Joyce Chopra • 1985 • United States
Starring Laura Dern, Treat Williams, Mary Kay PlaceSuspended 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...
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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...
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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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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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The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Movie
Directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich • 2024 • United States
Starring Zita Hanrot, Motell Gyn Foster, Josué GutierrezA 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...
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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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Working Girls
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1986 • United States
Starring Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda GoodwinSex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experience...
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Toute une nuit
Movie
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1982 • Belgium, France
Starring Aurore Clément, Tchéky Karyo, Jan DecorteA 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...
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All We Imagine as Light
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Payal Kapadia • 2024 • France, India, Netherlands
Starring Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya KadamPayal 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...
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Me and You and Everyone We Know
Movie + 6 extras
Directed by Miranda July • 2005 • United States
Starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles ThompsonWith 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...
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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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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...
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Wolf’s Hole
Movie
Directed by Věra Chytilová • 1987 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Miroslav Machácek, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka CervenkováVěra 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...
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My Brilliant Career
Movie + 5 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #973
Directed by Gillian Armstrong • 1979 • Australia
Starring Judy Davis, Sam NeillFor her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-ag...
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Short Films by Onyeka Igwe
1 season
Playful, absorbing, and deeply inquisitive, the films of Onyeka Igwe turn to the archives to challenge official narratives and excavate hidden histories. Whether tracing fragments of her own family history in THE NAMES HAVE CHANGED, INCLUDING MY OWN AND TRUTHS HAVE BEEN ALTERED, reimagining antic...
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Alma’s Rainbow
Movie
Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1994 • United States
Starring Kim Weston-Moran, Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Mizan NunesA 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...
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Directed by Joyce Chopra
1 season
Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...
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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...
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Sambizanga
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Sarah Maldoror • 1972 • Angola
Starring Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M’VondoThis 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...
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Girlfight
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Karyn Kusama • 2000 • United States
Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Jaime Tirelli, Paul CalderonBullied 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...
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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...