Women Make Film

Women Make Film

54 Episodes

Five years in the making, this epic journey through film history is made up of forty “chapters” narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Sharmila Tagore, Kerry Fox, Thandie Newton, and Debra Winger. WOMEN MAKE FILM follows in the footsteps of Mark Cousins’s THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY to give us a guided tour of the art and craft of the movies. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Cousins explores how films are made, shot, and edited; how stories are shaped; and how movies depict life, love, politics, humor, and death through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest directors—all of them women. The series is presented here along with a selection of women-directed films that appear in it.

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Women Make Film
  • Me and You and Everyone We Know

    Episode 1

    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...

  • Fish Tank

    Episode 2

    Directed by Andrea Arnold • 2009 • United Kingdom
    Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing

    British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for the intense and invigorating FISH TANK, about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia (electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), who lives wi...

  • Tomboy

    Episode 3

    Directed by Céline Sciamma • 2011 • France
    Starring Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson

    TOMBOY tells the story of ten-year-old Laure (played by the amazing Zoé Héran) who moves to the suburbs and decides to pass as a boy among the pack of neighborhood kids. As “Mickäel” she catches the atten...

  • A Thousand Suns

    Episode 4

    Directed by Mati Diop • 2013 • France, Senegal
    Starring Magaye Niang, Wasis Diop

    Forty years after her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty's landmark of Senegalese cinema TOUKI BOUKI, Mati Diop revisits its lead actor, Magaye Niang, to explore the legacy of a film that continues to loom large.

  • Heart of a Dog

    Episode 5

    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 seamlessly weaves together thoughts on...

  • Certain Women

    Episode 6

    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 Meloy and unfolding in self-containe...