My Favourite Films Directed by Women
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- DirectorAgnès VardaStarsJean-Claude DrouotMarie-France BoyerMarcelle Faure-BertinFrançois, a young carpenter, lives a happy, uncomplicated life with his wife Thérèse and their two small children. One day he meets Emilie, a clerk in the local post office.
- DirectorAgnès VardaStarsJane BirkinJean-Pierre LéaudPhilippe Léotard"I'll look at you, but not at the camera. It could be a trap," whispers Jane Birkin shyly into Agnès Varda's ear at the start of JANE B. PAR AGNES V. The director of CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 and VAGABOND once again paints a portrait of a woman, this time in a marvelously Expressionistic way. "It's like an imaginary bio-pic," says Varda. Jane, of course, is the famed singer ("Je t'aime ... Moi non plus"), actress (BLOW UP), fashion icon (the Hermes Birkin bag) and longtime muse to Serge Gainsbourg. As Varda implies, JANE B. PAR AGNÈS V. abandons the traditional bio-pic format, favoring instead a freewheeling mix of gorgeous and unexpected fantasy sequences. In each, Jane inhabits a new character, playing a cat & mouse game with Varda as they explore the role of the Muse and the Artist, all the while showcasing the multifaceted nature of Birkin's talent. "I'd like to be filmed as if I were transparent, anonymous, like everyone else," says Birkin. But her wish to be a "famous nobody" is impossible to achieve; Birkin is simply too magnificent, too mesmerizing. Here, Varda's signature mix of aesthetic innovation and generosity of emotion results in a surreal and captivating essay on Art, Fame, Love, Children and Staircases. For its first-ever U.S. theatrical release the film has been newly-restored from the original 35mm camera negative, overseen by director Varda herself.
- DirectorLarisa ShepitkoStarsBoris PlotnikovVladimir GostyukhinSergey YakovlevTwo Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the winter cold, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.
- DirectorMarguerite DurasStarsDelphine SeyrigMichael LonsdaleMathieu CarrièreAnne-Marie Stretter, wife of a French diplomat, lives in 1930s India. She takes many lovers as systems of oppression decay around her.
- DirectorCarla SimónStarsLaia ArtigasPaula RoblesBruna CusíAfter her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.
- DirectorJane ArdenStarsSheila AllenJane ArdenJack BondJane Arden's surreal take on a group of females in a therapy session.
- DirectorAgnès VardaStarsAgnès VardaAndré LubranoBlaise FournierAgnès Varda explores her memories, mostly chronologically, with photographs, film clips, interviews, reenactments, and droll, playful contemporary scenes of her narrating her story.
- DirectorLucile HadzihalilovicStarsZoé AuclairLea BridarolliBérangère HaubrugeA look inside an offbeat boarding school for young girls.
- DirectorVera ChytilováStarsLeos SucharípaLibuse PospísilováVlasta SpicnerováThis film was made as a kind of a "protest-song" against the panic fear of getting old and also against flirtation. The main character (played by Leos Sucharípa) is an elderly man, admittedly competent, but not very responsible. In the continuous fear, he is trying to do as much as he can but, instead of confidence, he only finds out that in the real life one cannot just take but must give as well. Last but not least, one must be able to resign to his age.
- DirectorAnne-Marie MiévilleStarsClaude PerronAnne-Marie MiévilleJacques SpiesserTwo women and two men meet. They talk: about language, about happiness, about love. Can passion be reconciled with wisdom, desire with fear, with exhaustion?
- DirectorYvonne RainerStarsJoanna MerlinKathleen ChalfantCatherine KellnerMildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.
- DirectorChantal AkermanStarsChantal AkermanImpersonal and beautiful images of Akerman's life in New York are combined with letters from her loving but manipulative mother, read by Akerman herself.
- DirectorAlice RohrwacherStarsAdriano TardioloAgnese GrazianiAlba RohrwacherAn unceasingly kind Italian peasant and his family are blatantly exploited by a tobacco baroness.
- DirectorChantal AkermanStarsStanislas MerharMarc BarbéAurora MarionThe tale of an Occidental merchant whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice.
- DirectorJRAgnès VardaStarsAgnès VardaJRJeannine CarpentierDirector Agnes Varda and photographer/muralist J.R. journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.
- DirectorLiliana CavaniStarsDirk BogardeCharlotte RamplingPhilippe LeroyA concentration camp survivor rekindles her sadomasochistic relationship with her lover, a former SS officer - now working as a night porter at a Vienna hotel - but his former Nazi associates begin stalking them.
- DirectorDanièle HuilletJean-Marie StraubStarsOlimpia CarlisiGuido LombardiGino FeliciTwo segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò", taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese's novel "La luna e i falò": after WWII the emigrant 'The Bastard' comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find that everyone he knew has died and the war has deeply changed relationships between people.
- DirectorEmerald FennellStarsCarey MulliganBo BurnhamAlison BrieNothing in Cassie's life is what it appears to be - she's wickedly smart, tantalizingly cunning, and she's living a secret double life. Now, an unexpected encounter is about to give Cassie a chance to right the wrongs from the past.
- DirectorChantal AkermanStarsChantal AkermanNatalia AkermanSylvaine AkermanFilmmaker Chantal Akerman documents the life of her mother Natalia Akerman, a Polish immigrant and survivor of Auschwitz.
- DirectorItonje Søimer GuttormsenStarsBirgitte LarsenMarte Wexelsen GoksøyrLars ØynoGritt hunts high and low for a home for herself and her artistic vision, undeterred by a lack of support, she embarks on her mission to bury capitalism and the patriarchy
- DirectorUlrike OttingerStarsDelphine SeyrigIrm HermannGillian ScaliciA group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess.
- DirectorAnja BreienStarsSvein Sturla HungnesAnne Marie OttersenLiv ThorsenA housewife is brutally raped a winter morning, and the day after a young woman becomes a victim of attempted rape. The Police suspect Anders, a young road worker who was seen on the site in both cases. Have they got the right man?
- DirectorRonit ElkabetzShlomi ElkabetzStarsRonit ElkabetzSimon AbkarianGabi AmraniAfter a lukewarm marriage of over twenty years, a woman appeals to her husband's compassion to obtain the desirable divorce document in front of a court, which proves to be more challenging than she would expect.
- DirectorChantal AkermanStarsDelphine SeyrigJan DecorteHenri StorckA lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. However, something happens that changes her safe routine.
- DirectorYvonne RainerStarsDaniel Martin BerkeyBlaire BaronGabrielle MadePrivilege is an intelligently-conceived, boldly-anarchic, and wickedly-insightful exposition on the culturally-ingrained and socially-divisive malaise of isms that artificially define and characterize empowerment in contemporary society: ageism, sexism, economic elitism, and racism. Yvonne Rainer conveys texture through the inter-cutting of archival footage, video, and film, as well as compositional layering through the film-within-a-film structure, elliptical (and self-referential) fusion of past and present, and the filmmaker's idiosyncratic penchant for superimposed typed text.