Films Directed by Women

Playfully avant-garde and exhibiting an intriguing sense of humor, PIZZAS offers a puzzle of widescreen imagery, brash pop moments, and road movie ambience. Pakalnina, Latvia’s best-known director, spun this cryptic but airy comedy/tragedy from a news item about two 18-year-old fast-food workers who robbed their employer’s safe and split. (Gene Siskel Film Center)

The Hijacker lands the plane at the Rīga Airport. 7 year-old Tom, travelling on his own, voluntarily becomes a hostage. Along with the traditional demands, the Hijacker adds the demands of the little hostage – beginning with some local chocolate and a self-instruction tape for learning the native language, and ending with organizing a Song Festival and a special biathletes’ performance – all ideas originating from a CD on Latvia.

An absurdist farce centering around a school in post-Soviet Latvia. After a rather disgusting prank (someone defecates in the school attic), the tyrannical headmistress deems that no one can leave until the culprit is caught. When the photographer's pet python escapes, havok breaks loose.

A film about a plastic spoon and a society that has reached a high level of development – oil is being retrieved from subterranean depths, transported to processing plants, turned into plastic, transported to another plant, where it acquires the shape of a spoon, transported to convenience stores, where we buy it, and is then soon tossed into the trash. In other words, this is a film about the efforts put into making a spoon that can be thrown away so effortlessly.

This documentary follows a bustrip from Tallinn to Kaliningrad. A route that was so common in the Soviet times now passes through 4 different countries and crosses 3 different borders.

Lithuanian photographer, the legend of Soviet Sixties' generation Vitas Luckus tragically passed away in 1987. Yet the life and times of the talented rebel still impassion and lead us to a journey questioning why, at all times, we are wary of those who are really free.

It was the year 1984 when a group of architects decided to organize a one night music band as a New Year's party joke in Kaunas, Lithuania. The joke proved to be so good that rumors about the new exciting rock band spread from lips to lips and soon their intellectual circus grew into the Rock Marches - massive events involving thousands of people - that transformed into the big meetings for Lithuanian Independence later named the Singing Revolution. This is the story about the people who raised their independence with the smiles and songs regardless of the danger of the situation.

Based on a Lithuanian writer’s novel “Breathing Into Marble” the film focuses on the challenges of a modern family. It is a romantic ballad with the plot of a thriller. Izabele and Liudas – itellectuals living in a homestead near a big city and raising the son, Gailius, who has a case of epilepsy and is smarter than most children his age. Izabele convinces her husband to adopt a six-year-old boy who is unable to put down roots in this new family and always fights for mother’s attention. Director Giedrė Beinoriūtė speaks about relationships, invisible bonds connecting our lives and responsibility for each other.

Conversations On Serious Topics is a film without exterior action, props, landscapes or special effects. Its main characters are children and teenagers with a special ability to describe the surrounding world. Intimate conversations with them reveal the picture of the modern world -- at times melancholic, at times comical, at times dramatic. Shot in a minimalist fashion, the film raises questions about loneliness, love, God, the world and human relations. "The world is people." "Don't you believe in God? I can teach you how to start believing..."

2016 film directed by Pepa San Martín

The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas.

The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.

What are the social climate and cultural traditions in Costa Rica which nurture "machismo" and allow the domination of women to continue in Latin America?

After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current country, godless, far from the old ideologies and where all his old colleagues have changed.

The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness.

1985 film directed by Valeria Sarmiento

1991 film by Valeria Sarmiento

1998 film by Valeria Sarmiento

A man's wife commits suicide and appears to him as a ghost. The ghost follows him everywhere – under the bed, under tables… After seeing the ghost so frequently, the man begins to resemble her.