Films Directed by Women

Persuaded by the janitor's wife, a lively, but lonesome old woman, who is only attached to the world through her cherished objects and memories, decides to exchange her two-room apartment for a smaller one. For a little while her everyday life is changed. She meets and entertains new people every day.

In 1866, the Szendrey family gathers for the name-day of Júlia’s sister, Mária, but the event dissolves into bitter grievances and the physical decline of the household. As the dying widow of the poet Sándor Petőfi, Júlia struggles with a failed second marriage while Mária grapples with jealousy over her own husband’s love for Júlia. The family’s fragile unity finally shatters under the suffocating weight of Sándor’s heroic legacy and the pervasive shadow of illnesses.

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

For this austere, clear and sharp telefeature, Judit Elek focused on the last months of Martinovics’ life: his interrogation by the Austrians, the examining Magistrate Schilling in particular, shown as a battle of wits as well as delusions on both sides. Elek had wanted to make this film in the early 1970s, but wasn’t allowed to. When she finally got the chance, the reactions were predictable, as the parallels with recent Hungarian history were simply too obvious for officialdom not to feel anxious. History may not repeat itself, but the variations look eerily similar.

The second part of Judit Eleks long-term documentary about two girls and their lives in a small Hungarian village. What has become of their dreams and hopes?

1952, Budapest. Kati is thirteen years old when her mother dies. Her father works as a founder at the Miskolc foundry, deprived of his former position of director-engineer. Kati is left alone in their flat, transformed into a place crowded with tenants. That is, not quite: in her imagination her mother is alive again, for she still needs her.

Aged just 14, Solymosi Eszter vanished without a trace after having been sent on an errand on April 1, 1882. Soon, a rumour started to make the rounds in the village of Tiszaeszlár: a blood libel that Jews had killed the Christian servant girl. Paranoia grew when, more than two months later, the body of a drowned girl was brought out of the Tisza. At that point, voices in parliament were already crying out ferociously for the deportation of all Jews on Hungary’s soil.
On July 29, after a lengthy period of investigations, the last antisemitic trial in the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy began. It ended with the accused’s acquittal (one of them afterwards fled to the Netherlands). The so-called Tiszaeszlár Affair had already been the subject of three fiction features: Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Der Prozeß (1948), W. Lee Wilder’s The Vicious Circle (1948) and Erdély Miklós’s Verzió (1979). Judit Elek’s version is the most detailed and historically accurate – sticking close to the original court transcripts and sober in its presentation of a culture ready and willing to turn genocidal if given half a chance. And it’s not over yet.
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This two-part film examines the plight of the working class. In part one, an elderly factory laborer goes to work in his last days before he is forced to retire. He leaves the factory life he has always known and goes home to his wife. In the second part, a young farm boy goes off to an industrial trade school to prepare for the very work the old man left behind. The old man loses his freedom by forced retirement while the young man loses his freedom by becoming a worker faced with a lifetime of factory work.

After her husband's death, Hanna Szendroy, the former primadonna, is caught in the claws of the real estate mafia. She looses her lavish home and ends up homeless at the Keleti train station. When she returns to her house, now full of homeless people moved in by the real estate mafia, an unexpected relationship brings hope into her life again.

The first part of Judit Eleks long-term documentary portraits the lives of two girls in a small Hungarian village: Marika and Ilonka. As they grow up, they have to decide between working and learning or marrying at the age of 15 and living up to their parents' expectations.

A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done? A diagnosis of a comfortable but profoundly incapable society, a Hungary suffering from an endemic private life disorder, observable both among the urban middle and the rural lower classes. A descent into a relationship’s demise, more from the tired inertia of a country that has lost all direction and sense of purpose than any ill will.

A young Saudi doctor campaigns for a seat on the municipal council, finding confidence as she combats prejudice.

Filmed over the last six months of the 2000 Presidential election, Phillip Seymour Hoffman starts documenting the campaign at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, but spends more time outside, in the street protests and police actions than in the orchestrated conventions. Hoffman shows an obvious distaste for money politics and the conservative right. He looks seedier and more disillusioned the campaign progresses. Eventually Hoffman seems most energized by the Ralph Nader campaign as an alternative to the nearly indistinguishable major parties. The high point of the film are the comments by Barney Frank who says that marches and demonstrations are largely a waste of time, and that the really effective political players such as the NRA and the AARP never bother with walk ins, sit-ins, shoot-ins or shuffles. In the interview with Jesse Jackson, Hoffman is too flustered to ask all of his questions.

What would drive someone to drop everything and move into a city park in lower Manhattan? In the fall of 2011 hundreds of people did just that as a public protest against corporate greed and with the hope of creating an alternative society. Occupy Wall Street started as an under attended protest that quickly caught fire and capturing international headlines, the imaginations and hearts of people across the globe. Almost overnight the movement transformed the national dialog about economic inequality and corporate corruption. The slogan 'We are the 99 percent' instantly became part of the national lexicon. This documentary is an intimate portrait of several key players who helped create the movement and their wild ride through the rise and fall of Occupy Wall Street.

在比小说还奇怪的老虎主人世界里，有各种古怪和另类的人物，但几乎没有人能比乔·野生更引人注目。他是一个留着胭脂鱼发型、持枪的一夫多妻主义者和西部乡村歌手，管理着俄克拉荷马州的一个路边动物园。魅力超凡但误入歧途的乔和一群令人难以置信的人物（包括毒枭、骗子和邪教领袖）都对老虎以及这种危险动物所获得的地位和关注有着莫大的热情。但卡罗·巴斯金（老虎保护区的动物维权人士和所有者）威胁要关闭他们的动物园时，事情变得可怕起来，他们的争斗最终让乔·野因一场雇凶杀人的阴谋而被捕，并揭露了一个扭曲黑暗的故事，而比老虎更危险的只有老虎的主人。

Ismini is in her early 30s. She is cultivated, delicate, sensitive and... emotionally handicapped. She has developed a simplistic system of defense to protect her emotions: no one is to come near. It is exactly the moment when this collapses that unsophisticated, simple, impolite, aggressive and greatly passionate Haris appears in her life.

Young Claudia works in a supermarket where she promotes various types of products. One night, she ends up in the emergency room with severe appendicitis and meets Martha, a patient, laying in the bed next to hers.

Jazmín, a young woman living in Mexico City, is nonplussed when she receives a call informing her that her father Toussaint, an illegal Haitian immigrant, is ill. She hasn't seen him in years, and does not know why they are calling her. When she finally gets to the hospital and discovers that her father is suffering from vascular dementia, she finds herself faced with the task of caring for a man who is more a stranger than a father to her.

A little boy is kidnapped outside his neighborhood. Her mother decides to seek for him while authorities disregard her case.