Films Directed by Women

The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

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.

Six months pregnant and living in a beat-up tiny mobile home, Wanda LeFauve thinks she has found the solution to her problems when she agrees to meet well-to-do Rachel Luckman and her husband. The childless Luckmans are desperate to raise a baby and Wanda is anxious to find a home for her latest. They strike a deal, but as the birth parents and the potential adoptive parents get to know each other, fundamental differences emerge.

2015 film by Chantal Akerman

A woman's life is torn apart when her husband and infant son are killed in a suicide bombing at a soccer match.

"Life and Death" - A female reporter intended to go on a reporting trip about childbirth to Japan, declines the offer. Instead, she visits a maternity hospital in Sweden. She meets a doctor, who she has been in love for 15 years.

1982 film by Angela Summereder

Thirty-year-old Camilla, realizes that she doesn't have the life she deserves and decides that the only destiny worthy of her is that of a royal princess.

A follow-up to the 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired", focusing on the filmmaker's successful battle to avoid extradition in to the U.S. in 2010.

Jim Bakker establishes a large televangelical empire in the 1980s, including Heritage Village. However, they are removed from P.T.L, the ministry that they had established in 1987.

1968 film by Liliana Cavani

Vivacious co-ed Rita falls in love with her music teacher, who leads a double life: bespectacled professor by day, rock star by night.

1958 Chinese film by Wang Ping

When 24-year-old Hend Nafea is arrested and tortured for demonstrating peacefully in Cairo's Tahrir Square, her pursuit of justice reflects post-revolution Egypt at an uncertain crossroads.

2015 film by Stina Werenfels

Based on years of research into the mass rapes committed by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. In the first part of the documentary Helke Sander interviews multiple German women who were raped in Berlin by Soviet soldiers in May 1945. Most women never spoke of their experience to anyone, after 46 years of silence they talk for the first time publicly about their violent experiences that have left such a mark.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.

A single mother who becomes the first victim of kidnapper Ariel Castro finds herself trapped in his home for 11 years, where she eventually becomes a friend and sister to two other women who are taken captive by Castro.

After being demoted from teaching Russian to middle-school English students, Me-sook is literally red-faced with shame, because on top of all her other issues — unrequited love, unpopularity — Me-sook has a blushing problem.

Anna, an odd, quirky young girl begins a romance with the much older dentist Dr. Armin Thal. Both lovers are neurotic, and both seem to thrive on feeding off each other's neuroses.