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

Agathe, 18, dreams of change. Gone are her vacations on the rainy beaches of Belgium! She decides to hitchhike down to the South of France, where she'll have many happy and less happy encounters. On the way to Paris, men of various ages offer to shorten her wait by the roadside. Some try to take advantage of her, while another, in a fit of madness, tries to stab her. Despite these assaults, Agathe continues her journey, heading for Valence and then Aix-en-Provence.

Daniel el Mochuelo ('Little owl') is a boy who must leave his village to go to study in the city. During the days leading up to his departure, Daniel and his inseparable friends Roque el Moñigo ('Cow pat') and Germán el Tiñoso ('Mangy') play, do some prank and, above all, observe the peculiar world of adults, which is a clear portrait of life in a small Spanish village during the Franco regime.

Charlie returns to the East End after two years at sea to find his house demolished and wife Maggie gone. Everyone else knows she is now shacked up with married bus driver Bert and a toddler, and they all watch with more than a little interest at the trail of mayhem Charlie leaves as he goes about sorting things out.

Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.

After WWII, a Soviet pilot returns to civilian life and struggles in her roles as school principal and mother, and with her memories of the war.

Brief Meetings is about a love triangle between three very different people. Nadia, a country girl, falls in love with Maskim, a roaming guitar playing geologist, and in her search for him she ends up working for Valentina, his long-distance, bureaucrat wife. Nadia begins to work as a maid for Valentina, but as they spend time together they have flashbacks to their brief meetings with Maskim. These flashbacks occur throughout the film and both Valentina and Nadia have them. Finally news arrives of Maskim's return to Valentina. On the day of his return Nadia cooks a meal for them both and leaves before they arrive, Valentina never knew of Nadia's encounters with Maskim, and Maskim will never know of Nadia's time with Valentina.

Treated as an outcast and exploited by the villagers of a small town, a young woman liberates herself through sex, which she uses as a tool of economic gain and an instrument of revenge against those who have wronged her.

Madeline Anderson’s documentary brings viewers to the front lines of the civil rights movement during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike, when 400 poorly paid Black women went on strike to demand union recognition and a wage increase, only to find themselves in confrontation with the National Guard and the state government. Anderson personally participated in the strike, along with such notable figures as Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, all affiliated with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Anderson’s film shows the courage and resiliency of the strikers and the support they received from the local black community. It is an essential filmed record of this important moment in the history of civil and women’s rights. The film is also notable as arguably the first televised documentary on civil rights directed by a woman of color, solidifying its place in American film history.

In grim, rust-belt Pennsylvania, Wanda is down and out. She works sporadically, has abandoned her husband and children, sleeps on her sister's couch, drinks and smokes too much, and goes home with men just to have a roof over her head. One night she walks into a bar after closing and finds a nervous Mr. Dennis pacing. She takes up with him, and he proves to be a criminal. They go on the road, visit his father, and he plans a robbery. He's rude and demanding; Wanda accepts his abuse docilely. What future does she have?

1968 Hong Kong drama film directed by Tang Shu Shuen

1971 film by Stephanie Rothman

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. He does not betray his companions, but is beaten to death in prison, and not knowing he is dead, his wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to know where he is.

A stodgy, married schoolteacher has a chance encounter with a free spirited young woman who loosens him up and introduces him to a hippie lifestyle.

Utitlising humour, fantasy, animation, poetry and theatrics, Hochman and her crew challenge the male establishment for ignoring the first meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus and Shirley Chisholm's bid for US vice-president.

In Miraflores, Cuba, the growing romance between Mario, a factory worker, and Yolanda, a schoolteacher, throws into relief the differences in their perspectives and values in Revolutionary Cuba.

When middle-aged Kata realises that her life will only be complete if she has a baby of her own, her longstanding-but-married boyfriend Joska refuses to comply. But by developing an unlikely friendship with the angst-ridden teenage orphan Anna, who is also involved in a controversial relationship, Kata discovers aspects of herself, and her role as a woman, that have gone unexamined throughout her entire, lonely life.

A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.

Ngor is a young man living in a Senegalese village who wishes to marry Columba. Ongoing drought in the village has affected its crop of groundnuts and as a result, Ngor cannot afford the bride price for Columba.

Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents' house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.

1976 film by Elaine May