Films Directed by Women

During the Bosnian War, Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, re-encounters Ajla, a Bosnian who's now a captive in his camp he oversees. Their once promising connection has become ambiguous as their motives have changed.

1994 film by Freida Lee Mock

Ben's fiancée has her heart set on an expensive dream wedding, but her father, Jack, has secretly gambled away all his money. When Ben discovers he has a talent for exotic dancing, Jack pushes him to moonlight as a stripper to finance the wedding.

A young couple try to fix their marriage troubles with the help of a psychiatrist.

A teenage mother is forced to give up her baby for adoption and, 19 years later, when she tries to contact her son, she learns that he died, under questionable circumstances when he was three years old.

After Women’s Story, Peng returns to the most straightforward representation of women’s issues in Shanghai Women, a film about three rural women. As the first work in Peng’s Shanghai Trilogy, Shanghai Women describes the problem that women encounter trying to secure urban (residential) space through the story of women from three generations.

Convicted of witchcraft, 8-year-old Shula is brought to live in a penal colony where witches do hard labour in service of the government.

"Mechanical Love" is a documentary on the interrelationship between robots and humans. The film portrays people who have a close relationship with a robot, and it takes us from the high temple of robot technology, Tokyo, Japan, to Braunschweig, Germany, to Italy and back to Copenhagen, Denmark. By this world tour director Phie Ambo seeks to highlight the human need for love and our craving to be loved by others - perhaps the two most important aspects of life. Through the main characters, she examines the cultural differences in how we accept emotional robots in the East and the West.

When Song Qi stumbles upon her boyfriend's affair with her best friend, her life quickly starts falling apart and she is subsequently drawn into a quicksand of revenge and murder. Though all is not as it seems and Song Qi will have to embark on a twisted journey into her past and the very depths of her own mind

In 2000, a California State Prison inmate serving Life Without Parole (LWOP) approached the warden to request a dedicated yard for men serving life sentences that would break the code of violence dominating prison life. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) subsequently transformed Yard A at California State Prison into The Progressive Programming Facility, which inmates call The Honor Yard. The only one of its kind in the United States, this experimental prison yard is free of violence, racial tensions, gang activity and illegal drug and alcohol use.

A 29-year-old lawyer and her lesbian best friend experience a dramatic shift in their longtime bond after one enters a serious relationship.

2015 film directed by Liz Garbus

Nerungi Vaa Muthamidathe is a road film that revolves around a trip from Trichy to Karaikal shot in the backdrop of a petrol crisis.

Mimmi lives with her mother in an apart-ment on the edge of town. They won't be living together for much longer because Mimmi is about to take her final exams at school and will soon move out. Mimmi's mother is still young and sometimes wish-es Mimmi didn't need her so much and yet, at other times, that she needed her more, like before. But Mimmi herself doesn't say very much and it's often hard to tell what thoughts preoccupy her. She sees her girlfriend, goes out with her boyfriend; she also has the odd flash-in-the-pan relationship with other men. She is often alone - perhaps just waiting for the time to pass, or for a new life to begin. On a school trip to Paris she meets and sleeps with a young man. When she gets back to Berlin she discovers that she is pregnant. She heads for Paris again where she spends two days trying to find the father of her child. She has no money and doesn't even know where she can sleep. She begins to daydream - and gets more and more tired.

A Bolivian mother has emigrated to Spain in the hope of being able to keep her family out of abject poverty. When her family member died from Chagas, a life-threatening parasitic disease, she still has to earn for livings far away from her home country; In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where armed conflict is ongoing, women are still under the threat of being sexually assaulted by combatants; In Uganda, thousands of children cover long distances every night to search for places of refuge to avoid being kidnapped as child soldiers; patients suffering from sleeping sickness do not have access to the essential medicines; thousands of Colombian families who are victims of the violence perpetrated by their country's various armed groups on the rural population try hard to return to their homeland.
With the help of Médecins Sans Frontières, five well-known directors have come together to give voice to the real-life protagonists of the film, the victims of five of the most under-reported crises.

After losing her job, making out with her soon-to-be former boss, and finding out that her daughter plans to spend Thanksgiving with her boyfriend, Claudia Larson faces spending the holiday with her unhinged family.

How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lines of history.

1993 film by Nancy Savoca

After a blow to the head, Abby decides she can't do it anymore. Her life just can't be only about the house, the kids and the wife. She needs more: she needs to be Eleanor.

Awarded Best First Feature at the Locarno International Film Festival, German-Argentinian newcomer Nele Wolatz’s THE FUTURE PERFECT explores fractured relationships within culture, tradition and language in this whimsical romantic comedy. Xiaobin has just moved to Argentina to reunite with her family, who own a laundromat in Buenos Aires. She finds work at a nearby grocery store, but after struggling to communicate with customers, she becomes determined to learn Spanish, enrolling in group language lessons for Chinese immigrants. The independence afforded by learning Spanish is offset by the anxiety of becoming further enclosed in Chinese culture through an arranged marriage, or alternately, accepting the proposal of coworker Vijay, who hopes to marry her and take her to live with him in India. As lessons progress, these decisions are placed on hold while the possibilities posed by Argentina expand with each new tense learned, providing a guide to hypothetical futures, hopes, fantasies and fears. — Malin Kan