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

1985 film by Christine Laurent

This rich, symbolic, intensely personal yet universal film wordlessly follows the path of a woman on a journey of self-discovery.

An intimate look into the Parsi community in post-independance Bombay. Aloof bachelor Pirojshah's close friend marries a naive pianist who he had unrequited love for. Pirojshah watches as the marriage gradually crumbles.

1987 film by Huang Shuqin

An imaginative and somewhat disturbed young girl fantasizes about evil creatures and other oddities to mask her insecurities while growing up in rural Australia.

After the Creed family's cat is accidentally killed, a friendly neighbor advises its burial in a mysterious nearby cemetery.

Shy teenager Megan moves to a new town with her widowed mother and quickly becomes the most unpopular girl in high school. But when she starts to communicate with a mysterious mirror, her tormentors begin to meet with a horrifying series of 'accidents'. Is the mirror a reflection of Megan's own inner demons... or has she unwittingly opened the doorway of the damned?

Based on the autobiographical work of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, this production depicts the author at various stage of her life. Afflicted with mental and emotional issues, Frame grows up in an impoverished family and experiences numerous tragedies while still in her youth, including the deaths of two of her siblings. Portrayed as an adult by Kerry Fox, Frame finds acclaim for her writing while still in a mental institution, and her success helps her move on with her life.

In 1902, an African-American family living on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina prepares to move to the North.

1991 film

Martin, a young blind photographer, is divided between his friendship with restaurant worker Andy and the exclusive love that Celia—who is terribly jealous of this new friendship—has for him.

Las Vegas is what you make of it. Hollywood makes it into a place of speedy, jacked-up risk. Nina Menkes is an American Filmmaker with no interest in that Vegas. Hers is a place of great expanses of dry earth, smudged blue sky, flat lakes, lonely people and incongruously garish or claustrophobic interiors. Queen of Diamonds is about moods, the Old Testament, death, marriage, hazard and how we watch images on a screen; it is only tangentially about a black jack dealer whose husband is missing.
Menkes, who once photographed Bedouin people in the Sinai, has an eye for compositional drama and a sense of pace that couldn't be more opposed to Hollywood time, which assumes viewer impatience. (...) Maintaining the integrity of a radical experimentalist with the resources of fine-grain 35mm film technology, Menkes may be on a course to making an unprecedented kind of cinema. Queen of Diamonds is a step in that course.

Nora, a single mother raising two teenage daughters, Shade and Trudi, waits tables at a truck-stop diner in a small New Mexico town. The beautiful and rebellious Trudi drops out of school and gets a job alongside Nora, while the younger Shade whittles away her time at Spanish movie matinees. Their lives are turned upside down when Trudi becomes pregnant and the girls' absent father returns.

A seductive teen befriends an introverted high school student and schemes her way into the lives of her wealthy family.

A look into the lives of the women and girls who inhabit the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey.

1994 film directed by Antonia Bird

The death of a prince brings a young woman back to the palace where she was born into servitude. The lingering legacy is brought into light from behind frosted windows and velvet curtains.

1995 film by Helena Solberg

The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness.

Spike and his sister Anjela live in the Terrordome, a huge ghetto that all the blacks have been forced to live in. Jodie, Spike's pregnant white girlfriend, ran away from an abusive white boyfriend who, after seeing her with Spike, sets up a trap for her. Spike's 11-year old nephew Hector dies as a result of this trap, and Anjela, finding the body of her son, goes on a police-killing rampage. Her apprehension sets off tension between Spike and his brother-in-law, as a race war broods inside the Terrordome.