Women Filmmakers
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1 seasonDirected by Lizzie Borden
1 season
Revolutionary in both content and form, the films of Lizzie Borden testify to the potential of a politically committed cinema to fight back against prevailing representations of women on-screen. Her first three features—the long-unavailable experimental documentary REGROUPING, the dystopian sci-f...
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1 seasonDirected by Rosine Mbakam
1 season
Working across both documentary and narrative, Cameroonian auteur Rosine Mbakam makes intimate, exquisitely observed portraits of West African women both at home and abroad that illuminate their inner lives with quiet force. In her early shorts DOORS OF THE PAST and YOU WILL BE MY ALLY and in her...
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1 seasonDirected 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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Movie + 3 extrasBergman 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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MovieOur Body
Movie
Directed by Claire Simon • 2023 • France
Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the d...
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MovieOur Father, the Devil
Movie
Directed by Ellie Foumbi • 2021 • United States
Starring Babetida Sadjo, Souleymane Sy Savane, Jennifer TchiakpeEllie Foumbi’s elegant moral thriller is a grippingly intense exploration of trauma, revenge, and forgiveness that stands as one of the most exciting feature debuts in recent memory. ...
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1 seasonDirected by Shirley Clarke
1 season
Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’...
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MoviePlan 75
Movie
Directed by Chie Hayakawa • 2022 • Japan, Philippines
Starring Chieko Baisho, Hayato Isomura, Stefanie ArianneIn a dystopian future, Japan’s government launches Plan 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic ...
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Movie + 6 extrasFarewell Amor
Movie + 6 extras
Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme LawsonIn her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil wa...
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1 seasonDirected by Lina Rodriguez
1 season
The search for identity is at the core of Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodriguez’s intimate, richly impressionistic films. Informed by her own immigrant experience, her narrative features like SO MUCH TENDERNESS and THIS TIME TOMORROW and her acclaimed documentary MY TWO VOICES capture women ...
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Movie + 8 extrasDrylongso
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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Movie + 1 extraDe Lo Mio
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Diana Peralta • 2019 • United States
Starring Sasha Merci, Darlene Demorizi, Héctor AníbalSibling bonds are both rekindled and tested in the achingly alive feature debut from Diana Peralta. Rita (Sasha Merci) and Carolina (Darlene Demorizi), two high-spirited sisters raised in New Y...
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MovieTrouble Every Day
Movie
Directed by Claire Denis • 2001 • France
Starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice DalleClaire 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...
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MovieThe Blue Caftan
Movie
Directed by Maryam Touzani • 2022 • France, Morocco
Starring Lubna Azabal, Saleh Bakri, Ayoub MessiouiWith her stirring and sensitive second feature, Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani (ADAM) weaves a richly emotional tapestry of love, forbidden desire, and compassion that’s as beautifully...
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1 seasonThe Blindness Series
1 season
A series of eight densely layered experimental video essays by Vietnamese American artist Tran T. Kim-Trang, The Blindness Series encompasses a dizzying array of themes and aesthetic strategies as it explores the many metaphorical resonances surrounding blindness and vision. Ranging in style from...
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1 seasonShort Films by Fanta Régina Nacro
1 season
The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...
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MovieLoving Highsmith
Movie
Directed by Eva Vitija • 2022 • Germany, Switzerland
Starring Gwendoline Christie, Annina Butterworth, Marijane MeakerThe life and work of celebrated American writer Patricia Highsmith are revealed through her diaries and notebooks and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends, and family...
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1 seasonDocumentaries by Deepa Dhanraj
1 season
Deepa Dhanraj’s films are decolonial feminism in action. A filmmaker whose intersectional view of gender oppression and collaborative approach to documentary were far ahead of their time, Dhanraj has dealt frankly with issues of class, caste, labor, patriarchy, and state violence over the course ...
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MovieAlma’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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1 seasonMárta 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...
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MovieWolf’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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The Slumber Party Massacre
Movie
Directed by Amy Holden Jones • 1982 • United States
Starring Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael VillellaScripted by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE puts a smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula. When Trish (Michelle Mi...
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Movie + 9 extrasThe Lure
Movie + 9 extras
Criterion Collection Edition #896
Directed by Agnieska Smoczyńska • 2015 • Poland
Starring Kinga Preis, Michalina Olszańska, Marta MazurekThis genre-defying horror-musical mash-up—the bold debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska—follows a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore ...
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1 seasonShort Films by Nikyatu Jusu
1 season
With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...
