BFI's The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women

The opening scene of our story shows a Union powder wagon making its way down the road convoyed by a company of mounted Union soldiers. The route of this wagon is reported to Confederate headquarters by one of its spies. Nan, a girl frequently employed by the department of the Confederate army, is called to headquarters and instructed to secure the destruction of the enemy's ammunition train just reported. Nan is fitted out with a Union uniform, mounted on a fast horse and sent on her journey, previously provided with a forged order supposedly signed by a Union general which authorizes her to pass through the lines.

An isolated house in deserted area is too remote for a servant, who leaves a note, quietly exits the back door, and puts the key under the mat. Alone in the house is a mother and her infant. A tramp watches the servant leave, then begins to skulk. The woman sees him outside as he discovers the latchkey. She phones her husband, who's working in town, and he jumps into a car idling in front of his office. He races toward home while the car's owner (and the police) are in pursuit. The tramp grabs a knife and heads up the stairs toward the defenseless woman. Can the husband elude the police long enough to rescue her or will the tramp have his way?

An abused young woman finds safety and love in the arms of a famous novelist.

Katja is about to graduate, but she has nothing to wear for the graduation ball. Her father, the eccentric inventor Carl Axel Kock does not spend much of his income on Katja while her brother Curry gets everything he wants. So on the day of the ball, Katja simply dresses up in her brother’s brand new evening attire and attends the dance, smokes cigars, drinks brandy–and causes a scandal.

1928 film directed by Germaine Dulac

Facing an arranged marriage to a man of dubious morals, heiress Korah Hurley poses as the impoverished travelling companion of her aunt, the Marquise de Jaurmais, in order to test whether her rakish fiancé's affections are truly for her or for the fortune she will inherit.

A drunken newspaperman is rescued from his alcoholic haze by an heiress whose love sobers him up and encourages him to write a play, but he lapses back into dipsomania.

Three bohemians rescue Ana María from her abusive stepfather. She lives chastely with them in gratitude. Over time, love blooms between her and Marcelo, despite their friends' heartache.

The story follows a Chinese-American girl who falls for a Cantonese opera star against her father's wishes and becomes pregnant.

A documentary on the housing problems of Great Britain following WWII

Poland, during World War II. Martha Weiss, a Jewish woman, arrives at the Auschwitz extermination camp with her family. She is assigned the role of interpreter, but her loved ones are much less fortunate.

The first Norwegian film to be directed by a woman, also considered as the first Norwegian Film Noir.
Wealthy socialite Sonja meets handsome, muscular mechanic Erik when she drops off her car for reparis. Instantly attracted to each other, they eventually break off relationships to be together.

A young woman who has just become engaged has her life completely shattered when she is raped while on her way home from work.

In Mexico City, two sisters live radically different lives: Maria, who—along with her supportive group of fellow sex workers—must deal with unscrupulous, abusive clients and her exploitative pimp, Rudy, and Elena, a society woman trapped in a marriage of convenience, who falls prey to Rudy’s fortune-seeking seduction.

When the Government decide to build a Festival of Britain exhibition site, everything goes to plan, all except the fact that the main road and the pedestrian subway into the site, are blocked by a little corner shop, which is owned and run by a Mr. Lord and his family. When the Lords refuse to be bought off, and decline the compensation offered by the authorities. the police and the bailiffs try to evict them, only to come under fire from the family, who have barricaded themselves inside the shop.

A strangely-garbed and eccentric-acting stranger arrives in a small English town. But, after several days on being in the town, the citizens accept him as a harmless, though a bit daft, member of the community. He then pays a visit to the town's leading citizen and reveals himself as a man with the perfect plan for murder.

Again a proof of Tait's genius for portraiture, and a film about the notion of portraiture itself and the investure of love in the seen portrait.
What is film for? Why is it different from still photography, where it comes to seeing its subject? What can it tell us about someone?
How somebody moves. How somebody is still.
Her mother sits in a landscape, keeping time to a tune with her hand. Detail is how to know someone. How she smokes. How she smiles wryly, or looks away.
A close-up of her mother's hands and the delicacy of them taking the wrapper off a very sticky sweet tells us everything we can know about this woman, and the care and the necessary distance, both, with which we observe those we love.
A long-shot of her mother, from behind, almost running almost dancing along a rural road beneath a greyed-out rainbow is, in that miraculous Tait way, so placed, so unquaint and so natural, as to leave its viewer renewed and knowing again what it is, simply to be alive.

A long, brave reach for a portrait, not of an intimate, private love, but of an inspiration, an icon, a man only ever sketched obliquely however many times he painted himself.

1955 film directed by Kinuyo Tanaka

1956 British film by Lorenza Mazzetti