Films Directed by Women

Bird droppings on a work shirt lead to extreme unintended consequences.

A group of innocent people is charged with human trafficking and thrown into prison. The authorities announce they’ve dealt a blow to organised crime; the public is reassured. “Pagadores” are what the victims of such procedures are called in Mexico. In her second feature documentary, Tatiana Huezo has a young mother recount her journey through hell: innocent, robbed of her liberty, she’s handed over to those for whom she’s being made to atone – in a private prison controlled by the Gulf Cartel.
Tempestad is a road movie: 2000 kilometres by bus from Matamoros to Cancún, through a blustery, overcast, bleak country. Inspections by martial-looking men armed to the teeth, omnipresent fear. A country mired in an invisible war whose front lines are equally invisible. The viewer never sees the protagonist but just hears her voice. The images create space for our own imagination and help us digest the monstrosity of the account. When they create identification, they’re deceiving us, for they’re inviting us to think of other stories, other destinies. The film itself recounts one of these, the story of a circus performer who has lost her daughter. A necessary cut in a film of tremendous force. berlinale 2016

To walk into the jungle-shrouded village of Cinquera, El Salvador, is to enter a world where ghosts walk, passing back and forth between the past and present. During the 1980–92 civil war, Cinquera was invaded by the National Guard, which targeted it as a potential haven for guerrillas of the FMLN opposition. Cinquera was literally wiped off the map, disappearing temporarily from official charts in a conflict that resulted in 80,000 deaths with tens of thousands more disappeared. Here, decades after a brutal civil war annihilated the village, survivors return to bury their dead and rebuild the community from the ashes. Award for the best feature documentary film from the Documentary Film Festival Visions du Réel (2011).

2013 film by Pirjo Honkasalo

A searing examination of the unrelenting Chechen conflict, observed through the prisms of a Russian military boys academy, a war-torn town and a children's refugee camp.

This biographical film celebrates the little-known life of the Finnish novelist and revolutionary Maiju Lassila (Asko Sarkola), born in 1868. Lassila's early years are briefly shown, then the film richly details his active and paradoxically reclusive adult life, beginning with his sojourn in St. Petersburg, working as a businessman. Unable to stay away from politics, he caused the assassination of a high-ranking Czarist and as a result, had to run back to Finland to hide. Once established in the comparative safety of a small village, he taught school in order to support his real vocation as a writer. Always living on the edge of poverty, if not square in the middle of it, Lassila continues to avoid public contact - he keeps his identity low-key and camoflages it by publishing under a variety of pseudonyms.

A biographical documentary following the life of a young Japanese priest and bar-owner.

1985 film by Pirjo Honkasalo

1991 documentary film directed by Pirjo Honkasalo

A documentary about Tanjuska who is a 12-year-old White-Russian schoolgirl, with a face like an icon. Two years ago she stopped eating, then talking and finally she stopped growing. The village priest in Estonia has explained to the family that seven devils have made a home inside Tanjuska. These devils are giving her orders and only a daily ceremony can force the devils to leave the girl.

The twin sisters Helena and Irene are born in Helsinki during World War II. A few months later their mother, Sirkka, leaves the girls in the care of their grandmother, an old communist, and runs away with a German soldier. Their life under the protection of their grandmother and the teachings of communism ends first with the death of Stalin, then with that of their grandmother. The girls are eight years old when they are put in an orphanage. Their mother shows up at the orphanage in the company of Ramon, a Spanish trapeze artist. They are on a talent search for a German circus. Ramon trains the reluctant Irene during circus tours in Central Europe. She becomes the trapeze star of the circus. The hard work soon exhausts Irene and she falls from height, as if on purpose. Helena has secretly learned the art of fire-eating. Now she is burdened with both her mother and her sister. The violent life, however, separates the three from each other. In the present-day Helsinki the middle-aged...

1997 documentary film directed by Pirjo Honkasalo

Docudrama about the Soviet occupation of a Finnish village in the fall before the Winter War.

Bahman Mohassess was a celebrated artist at the time of the Shah. Trained in Italy, he created sculptures and paintings in his homeland. But audiences often took offence at the pronounced phalli on his mostly naked bronze figures and his work was regularly censored. All traces of him were lost after the revolution. It was said he destroyed his remaining paintings and disappeared.

Filmmaker Mitra Farahani portrays love and sex in today’s Iran. One part fiction and one part documentary, the film was shot secretly and is banned in its native country.

Story of a couple on the second night of their wedding and how things unfurl in their lives.

Eager to taste the world, Teresa relocates from her native Portugal to move in with a longtime friend and fellow expat in Brazil. A nuanced, sensitive exploration of place, home and the shifting sands of friendship. Winner: Best Film, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Brasília.

In the Espinhaço Mountains one winter, a group of small-town Brazilian girls are experiencing the end of their youth. Impossible romances leave marks on their bodies and the surrounding landscape. Each of the friends finds her own particular way to overcome the loneliness and to live within a tangle of uncertainty.

Brazilian outback, cowboys preserve their age-old customs, communicating with their cattle in a form of plaintive singing known as Aboio. The chant resounds an improvised, ancient form that is an entrance to the life and the imaginary of the ancient Brazilian cattle drivers.

After thirty years living in Angola, the Portuguese ethnologist Acácio Vieira, along with his wife Conceição, moves to Brazil bringing with him an extensive archive of the life of people of Angola and Portuguese colonizers. Weaving memories, images and personal stories, the film embarks on an affectionate journey of the couple’s past, while reconstructing a link of the three countries in which they lived.