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

Difficult tale of a poor, struggling South Carolina mother and daughter who each face painful choices with resolve and pride. Tired Anney and her daughter Bone grow both closer and farther apart as Anney sees Glen as her last chance despite his mistreatment of Bone.

Over the years, a child's romantic ideals about death blossom into necrophilia, the study of embalming and the most profound relationship of her life.

A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.

A woman and her seven children live on a farm in Southern France. In spite of the hard work and the mediocre accommodation, their life would be a happy one, but for one person: the owner of the farm, an egotistic and authoritarian individual who is also the lover of the woman and the father of all her children. The farmer handles them as his property, uses them as cheap labour to work in the fields, and denies them the right to leave the farm. It is only the love of the woman for her children that allows them to endure their situation; but even for her, disenchantment has set in.

Summer heats up in rural Louisiana beside Eve’s Bayou, 1962, as the Batiste family tries to survive the secrets they’ve kept and the betrayals they’ve endured.

Li Hong spends several months in a tiny room no bigger than a closet with four girls from a remote village in Hunan province who have come to Beijing to work as domestics.

After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two Iranian sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time.

Megan is an all-American girl. A cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. But Megan doesn't like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she's pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. Her conservative parents worry that she must be a lesbian and send her off to "sexual redirection" school, where she must, with other lesbians and gays learn how to be straight.

An exotic dancer recalls an incident from her childhood where she was physically abused by a male visitor.

A girl reaches the age of nine and is supposed to act as a grown woman according to her family. A girl participates in a bike race against the will of her husband. An elderly woman decides she wants to buy all the things she always wanted but could never get.

The story of three people and their complicated emotional relationship. A mother and her 30-year-old son live in a poor neighborhood in a big city. She is having trouble finding a job, he is having trouble finding his way in modern realities. The mother's sudden illness shatters the son's previous life. The new situation requires from him maturity, which he unfortunately lacks. A woman appears in his life, whom he uses in his game with his mother.

2001 film by Sandrine Veysset

2002 film by Ibolya Fekete

The soundtrack to a radio soap opera set in a luxury hotel is acted out by characters who are riding a ramshackle bus from Bangkok to a small town in Thailand’s Northeast.

At the start, Christine Blanc is a temp, her boyfriend has gone. Near the story's end, she's been offered a steady job, she has a fiancé, other men seem interested in her, she's passed her driving test, and, after she wins 1000 Euros in a scratch-off, her colleagues sing that she's a jolly good fellow ("one of us"). But something's askew: her gaze is too direct, her eyes open too widely; conversational gambits hit odd notes; she parrots others' words; she cooks too much food when she invites a supervisor to dinner. When the supervisor takes Christine on a spontaneous outing that disorients her, her oddities become something else. Can things ever be normal?

Second chapter of La fêlure du temps. "As a child, I loved to dance. I remember a time we lived in happiness"

A 19-year-old girl prepares to become a suicide bomber in Times Square. She speaks with a nondescript American accent, and it’s impossible to pinpoint her ethnicity. We never learn why she made her decision—she has made it already.

This wild and outrageous Japanese film by Satoko Yokohama tells the story of a 16 year old girl named Yoshiko, who lives all alone since her mother died and father entered the hospital. There isn't much opportunity in a small town for a teenage girl to make a living, so Yoshiko gives recorder lessons to the neighborhood kids - but when she learns that some of her pupils have caught the eye of a local pedophile, she takes up a part-time job as a vigilante! Her plans to do right by her odd array of students include brutal emasculation, but at the end of the day, the sweet young thing never forgets to reward her precious tykes with treats.

Behind the Rainbow explores the transition of the African National Congress (ANC) from its role as a liberation organization to its position as South Africa's ruling party, by means of the evolution of the relationship between two of its most prominent leaders, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Exiled under Apartheid, brothers in arms following Mandela's leadership, they loyally labored to build a non-racial state. Now they are bitter rivals. Their confrontation threatens to tear apart the ANC and the country, mean while the poor desperately seek hope in change and the elite fight for the spoils of victory.

When her husband is sentenced to eight years in prison, Ruby drops out of medical school in order to focus on her husband's well-being while he's incarcerated - leading her on a journey of self-discovery in the process.