Films Directed by Women

Recently-widowed Leann and her 17-year-old daughter Julina move into an isolated polygamous compound, where the freethinking Julina meets like-minded Ryder, son of the religious compound’s charismatic Prophet, Ervil. Immediately drawn to one another, the two begin to secretly meet and soon fall in love. Threatened by his son’s budding attraction to Julina, Ervil claims God has instructed him to take Julina as his new wife so they can build a new community in Mexico. When Ryder and Julina learn of Ervil’s intent to destroy their relationship, they begin to plan their escape. However, Ervil intercedes and banishes Ryder from the sect, leaving him in a remote area of the desert so he can no longer endanger his plan to marry Julina. Wandering for miles, Ryder arrives in Las Vegas, where he finds his old friend and excommunicated “lost boy” Micah and enlists his help to rescue Julina. Back at the compound, Leann and her sister-wives also begin to realize Ervil’s role as Prophet is not as sacred as they originally believed and set out to save Julina and reunite her with her true love, Ryder.

When Mahi's son dies in a car accident, Behrouz who has returned to Iran to sell his properties, attends the funeral. Their old romance catches up while Behrouz has planned to marry Sara and go back to Canada with her.

欧琪的婚姻生活万事美满，但从一通电话开始，生活的伏流暗影全浮上了台面；先是老父亲进了医院，过往情人影像侵入心房，自己丈夫则投进了他人怀抱；情节乍看似喜剧，却是生命中不可承受之轻，笑泪交织，真相如此沉重。看雅丝敏阿莫拍片像是在薄冰上跳芭蕾舞，那姿态总是轻盈，底下却触及种族、宗教、性别等等一碰即碎的敏感议题。
Anxiety tells a story of love and forgiveness, its possibilities and the hope it brings. Essentially there are two stories: the first follows Orked’s life while the second tells the story of a muezzin and his efforts to assist two prostitutes in finding redemption.

In this story, the 60th birthday of Cohen-family matriarch Rosha is the occasion for a gathering of her children from the diverse places around the world. The central character in this drama, however, is Angelique, whose interest in psychoanalysis has earned her the nickname of "Freud." Her older brother is gay and lives in Florida with his lover. Her older sister has married into an Orthodox family, and lives in Jerusalem. They have all gathered in Sweden for their grandmother's birthday. Meanwhile, Rosha's daughter, the mother of these diverse children, has taken ill and is in the hospital. She has been diagnosed with a very advanced, inoperable brain tumor. Freud, who never left home, is perhaps as upset by this news as anyone, and she startles everyone by going out and beginning an affair with a biker. However, she is deeply involved in the new situation: she insists that their mother be brought home from the hospital rather than being allowed to suffer and die there.

Durval and his mother Carmita live at the back of "Durval Discos", a record store they own in São Paulo, specializing in vinyl records. They lead a boring and unattractive life, until the day Durval hires a maid, Celia, to help his mother with the housekeeping. However, on her second day, Celia goes away leaving a 5-year-old child behind, Kiki, and a note promising to be back in a couple of days. Durval and Celia are charmed by the child at first, but soon they see some sad news about Celia and Kiki on TV that will change the whole situation.

A top surgeon is besotted with a beautiful woman who once rebuffed him. Unable to come to terms with life without her, he tries to convince her that they need each other. She has other ideas, but a horrific accident leaves her at his mercy.

Pig and Runt born on the same day, in the same hospital, moments apart. Twins, all but by bloodline. Inseparable from birth, they are almost telepathic. They are one, needing no one else, inhabiting a delicate, insular and dangerous world where they make their own rules and have their own language. But days before their 17th birthday the balance of their world begins to shift. Pig's sexual awakening and jealousy begins to threaten their private universe.

An intimate documentary that follows Tig Notaro, a Los Angeles based comedian, who just days after being diagnosed with invasive stage II breast cancer changed the course of her career with a poignant stand-up set that became legendary overnight. It explores Tig's extraordinary journey as her career ignites and as her life unfolds in grand and unexpected ways, all the while continuing to battle a life-threatening illness and falling in love.

Will Keane, a Manhattan restaurateur, is content with his playboy lifestyle until he meets Charlotte Fielding, a free-spirited young woman. Together the pair pursue a passionate affair that forces them both to reevaluate what they want out of life, even as fate threatens to steal away their future.

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.

Der Film erzählt die Geschichte des Markus Anatol Weisse, der trotz extremer Sehbehinderung erstaunlicherweise Maler geworden ist, der seltsame Maschinenwesen baut und sich selbst wünscht, ein Bio-Roboter, ein Cyborg, zu sein.

On April Fool's Day, 1989, a man crossing the road between two garage sales was hit by a car and thrown into a state between life and death. Nine years later, his daughter uses her camera to try and understand both the absent moment and its lasting impact on her family, Russian immigrants marooned in Colorado.

The people of Rwanda attempt to reconcile after the genocide through an open process of admission and forgiveness.

Virginia, who studies at a boarding school for upper-class girls, falls in love with a medical intern who works as a waiter for a living. Both the director of the school and her mother oppose such a relationship.

Soon-to-be-wed graduate student Finn Dodd develops cold feet when she suspects her fiancé is cheating on her. In order to clear her head, Finn visits her grandmother, Hy, and great aunt, Glady Joe Cleary, in Grasse, Calif. There, Finn learns that Hy and Glady Joe are members of a group of passionate quilters, and over the course of her visit she is regaled with tales of love and life by women who have collected rich experiences and much wisdom.

Rookie cop Megan Turner orders a burglar to drop his gun. He whirls to shoot. Too late. Turner fires, killing him instantly. When someone lifts the assailant's gun from the crime scene, the police hold Turner accountable for killing an unarmed man. That same someone carves Turner's name into the bullets and uses them in a series of murders. Turner teams up with detective Nick Mann to clear her name and catch the killer. But she is drawn into a deadly game of wits with a psychopath who's always one step ahead… and much closer than she thinks!

The film is composed of five sequences, each preceded by a quotation. 1: “Ghost white like a not yet written page” (Mallarmé, “Mimique” ): A mime of Kleist’s Penthesilea, filmed in long shot from a fixed camera position. 2: “The shadows sprinkled in black characters” (Mallarmé, “Quant au livre”): A lecture on Kleist’s play, the myth of Penthesilea and the theoretical basis of the film, delivered by Peter Wollen while moving about a terrace and adjoining living room, the camera tracing an independent trajectory within the same confined space and occasionally approaching the index cards of notes left behind by Wollen at various stages in his route. 3: “Blazons of phobia, seals of self-punishment” (Lacan, after Vico): A succession of images relating to Penthesilea and the Amazons — paintings, sculptures, artifacts, tapestries, etc., including frames from a Wonder Woman comic book — separated by animated wipes and maskings, and accompanied on the soundtrack by Berio’s “Visage”. 4: “Net of light on overlight” (H.D., “Projector”): A silent film, What 80 Million Women Want (1913), on which a woman’s face in color is superimposed, speaking the words of feminist Jesse Ashley. 5: “Notes on the magic writing pad” (Freud): Four black-and-white television screens simultaneously present The preceding sections of the film; the camera occasionally isolates an individual screen, and similarly the soundtrack occasionally highIights one of the preceding soundtracks; gradually the material on the screens is replaced by new footage of the mime actress portraying Penthesilea returning to her dressing room, taking off her make-up, and addressing the camera.

Fascinating overall for its investigation into alternative didactic methods and the relationship between independently expressive surfaces and texts, Penthesilea is far from simple going when one confronts the opening sequence: too remote from both the mime itself and one’s subsequent perception of the film’s general design, it simply demands more (or less) than one can comfortably bring to it. Once past this obstacle — an interesting and legitimate sequence that acquires interest only after the fact — one is swiftly rewarded by the words and camera movements of sequence #2, which beautifully juggle sound and image, theory and practice, Wollen’s trajectory and the camera’s in something resembling a two-part invention. Wittiest of all are the cue cards strewn in Wollen’s path, which the camera ‘picks up’ after him like a dutiful servant: sometimes the words on the card duplicate an earlier part of the lecture, sometimes the reflection of light on the cards makes the words paradoxically illegible, and at one strange juncture — properly speaking, the only ‘fictional’ moment in the entire film — the words appear just as they are being spoken in another room. Sequence #3 registers as a systematic exploration into how one can arrive at an order of things (the succession of Wonder Woman frames providing an inventory of ways one image can follow another), while the Berio piece offsets this with what is described.in the Autumn 1974 Screen (an interview with Mulvey and Wollen that usefully supplements the film) as “the ‘birth’ of a new form of language”. #4 juxtaposes two ‘texts’ in the form of superimposed images, with a historical artifact set against a contemporary recitation of a historical document; and #5 exploits some of the Wavelength-like paradoxes of relative illusionist surfaces (as when the camera moves into a TV screen showing sequence #2,where the camera is also moving) while drawing all of the previous juxtapositions and new material into fresh mixtures and relationships. Each sequence, it must be noted, consists of two reels ‘invisibly’ joined (in the manner of Rope), and the justifications for this non-editing are stated succinctly in Wollen’s lecture, which also alludes to “The space between a story that is never told and a history that has never yet been made” — that array of lecture material around an unarticulated story that the film occupies, with speculative past myth and speculative utopian myth developing concurrently from the empty spaces. Curiously but perhaps inevitably, the film’s conceptual framework somewhat overrides the feminist theme it pursues, and the question of how one perceives Penthesilea becomes somewhat more of a subject than the figure herself. One recalls the structure of Godard’s One Plus One, with its similar notion of grappling with diverse phenomena by placing them side by side (albeit in an edited context), with the Anne Wiazemsky question-and-answer sequence performing an expositional function somewhat analogous to Wollen’s lecture. But One Plus One arguably represented the end of something, while Penthesilea suggests a beginning — a step forward in the European avant-garde that cross-fertilizes more active currents (from the American structural film to Tel Quel) than this review could hope to enumerate. An object for reflection and inquiry more than a ‘finished’ statement, it is a theoretical do-it-yourself kit –- or stated differently, an exploratory tool –- of the first importance. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

At her husband's funeral, Pearl, Jewish mother of two divorced and antagonistic daughters, meets an old Italian friend of her husband, whose advice years previously had stopped the husband leaving home. For 23 years he, now a widower, has secretly loved Pearl.

Four families of different ethnicities prepare for a potentially explosive Thanksgiving dinner.

After starting at an upmarket boarding school, a teenage girl forms close friendships with her two older roommates. However, when she discovers that her new friends are lovers she finds herself caught in a complicated situation.