Films Directed by Women

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.

While English professor Loretta Lawson is attending a conference in Paris, she stays the night in the flat of a friend's acquaintance. She discovers a sleeping man in one of the bedrooms, and the next morning finds the man gone, but the bed soaked with blood. Returning to Cambridge, she begins to suspect her friend's acquaintance, and others on the staff of the college, are involved with the missing (murdered?) man, and decides to investigate for herself.

The Runeberg family is an ordinary middle class family, with a house in a suburb, a car and three children. By vacationing in a rented house by the sea, the hope is that the tension and anxiety between Rune and Gunnel will disappear. However, instead of spending time with his family, Rune finds himself attracted to a young man, Petrus. Whatever happens next, Rune realizes, it can never be like it was before.

A look at Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's fatal visit to New York City, and his stormy relationship with his wife Caitlin.

One clear summer day in a Baltimore suburb, a baby goes missing from her front porch. Two young girls serve seven years for the crime and are released into a town that hasn't fully forgiven or forgotten. Soon, another child is missing, and two detectives are called in to investigate the mystery in a community where everyone seems to have a secret.

Tuba works daily at a grueling textile factory in Iran, returning home every night to deal with the rest of her problematic family, which includes: a pregnant daughter whose husband beats her regularly; a teenage son, who's been getting into trouble due to his burgeoning career in radical politics; and an older son who goes to great lengths--such as attempting to sell the family's meager house--in order to get an engineering job in Japan as a means of getting out of Iran. Unfortunately the 'friend' to whom he gave his money as an advance for his trip took off with the money, and the son finds himself without money, without a career, and with a debt towards a lot of people. To solve his problems he wants to deliver a package of heroin, but loses it, and has to flee. The film ends dramatically with a direct call from the mother to the camera crew asking what life has given them after all the sacrifices they have done, mirroring the opening scene.

After graduating from film school, Aura returns to New York to live with her photographer mother, Siri, and her sister, Nadine, who has just finished high school. Aura is directionless and wonders where to go next in her career and her life. She takes a job in a restaurant and tries unsuccessfully to develop relationships with men, including Keith, a chef where she works, and cult Internet star Jed.

1999 film directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

An official is sent from his home in Tehran to hear the final appeal of a woman sentenced to death, a political prisoner. The official's wife of nearly 20 years, Fereshteh Samimi, writes him a letter to read when he reaches the hotel - the story of her student days during the revolution of 1978. We see the story in flashbacks as he reads: she leaves her province on scholarship, joins a Communist youth group, avoids arrest, and comes under the sway of a suave older man, Roozbeh Javid, a literary-magazine editor. As she tells her husband about the hidden half of her life, Fereshteh asks that he listen to the woman facing execution, a woman and therefore one of Iran's hidden half.

Cecilie and Joachim are about to get married when a freak car accident leaves Joachim disabled, throwing their lives into a spin. The driver of the other car, Marie, and her family don’t get off lightly, either. Her husband Niels works in the hospital where he meets Cecilie and falls madly in love with her.

Three brothers, who were separated at birth, are brought up in different religions and are reunited by fate. Together, they combat the evil man responsible for their separation.

A woman haunted by her past, Detective Robin Griffin, investigates complex and unsettling cases.

The film recounts Carlo Giuliani’s day of July 20 and, parallel to it, the July 20 of the march of the ‘disobedients’, or the ‘white overalls’, among whose ranks Carlo died. An individual’s story is told in all its absolute concreteness, the friends he meets, the snack bar he goes to for a bite, the roll of scotch tape he picks up on the street; whereas a multitude’s story is told in all its epic tragedy, the night under the rain, the colossal preparation against the march, the advance behind shields, the attack of which the multitude was victim, the defense that gets organized.

Cheung, a single mother living in an area with high crime rates, works hard to provide for her son while helping out her elderly neighbor.

1976 film by Marguerite Duras

In her first feature-length documentary, director Mina Shum (Double Happiness) takes a penetrating look at the Sir George Williams University riot of February 1969, when a protest against institutional racism snowballed into a 14-day student occupation at the Montreal university.

Essay documentary explores eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of lesbian and gay culture. First feature by a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Hammer weaves gay and lesbian couples with footage that unearths the forbidden and invisible history of a marginalized people.

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.

1981 film by Margarethe von Trotta

1982 Hong Kong film directed by Ann Hui