Films Directed by Women

This thriller investigates the mysterious assassination of a gay pastor in rural South Africa. Without witnesses or explanations, the crime appears to the police and others as a jigsaw puzzle without enough pieces. The police then suspect and arrest people based on the usual prejudices, black and coloured people who plant marijuana in this case. Meanwhile, the true assassin not only goes his way unpunished from the very beginning, but becomes one of the rural town's most respected citizens. The sheriff at one point does begin having certain suspicions, and from there on the bulk of the plot is played out. The location is a very arid part of South Africa, so with so much desert rock, there are bound to be quarries. Some may reveal important secrets.

Though its aftertitles detailing the history of French nuke experiments suggest otherwise, writer/director Marion Hänsel’s Black Ocean is not a political treatise or a history lesson, instead taking advantage of the remote, isolated environments in which the experimentation took place – as well as the monumental imagery of the act itself – in order to communicate a more universal story about the power of awe. Ocean principally follows three young sailors on a French naval vessel in 1972, who are on course for an unknown destination in order to help carry out the bomb tests they’ve yet to personally witness. The film is essentially divided into two parts: before and after the blast.

Ludovic is the son of Nicole, a single mother who married Micho, a man older than her. He agreed to adopt her son. Ludo is the scapegoat of Tatave, first son of Micho and the favoured victim of his teacher. Communication between Ludo and his mother is non-existent. While her own health is deteriorating, she eventually entrusts him to an asylum.

2013 film by Marion Hänsel

2016 film by Marion Hänsel

Marion Hänsel directed this personal meditation on the joys and responsibilities of parenthood, in which a narrator reads Hansel's philosophic musings on raising her young son on her own, while carefully shot and selected footage of different cloud formations from around the world provide a striking visual backdrop. Catherine Deneuve read Hänsel's text in the original French-language version of Nuages; Charlotte Rampling did the honors for the English-language print, while Barbara Auer, Carmen Maura, and Antje De Boeck respectively lent their voices to the German, Spanish, and Dutch editions of the film.

1982 film by Marion Hänsel

A renowned conductor suddenly pulls out of an evening rehearsal of Madame Butterfly. The opera director senses something is going on and forces the musician to explain himself.

When her nation is invaded, a young princess is taken into the Princess Protection Program. She is relocated to Louisiana, where she stays with a covert agent and his tomboyish daughter, and must learn how to behave like an ordinary teenager.

School captain Ellie is seriously crushing on her rebellious classmate Abbie. Determined to ask her first love to the year 12 formal, Ellie devises a plan to go public with the invitation but before she can go through with it, her dead aunt Tara reappears from beyond the grave. Believing she's been brought back from the dead to be Ellie's fairy godmother, Tara dishes out unwanted dating advice based on her life as an out lesbian in the '80s.

A doctor takes in a mysterious man who washes ashore at her remote cottage with a gunshot wound. Quickly they both learn the killer has arrived to finish the job, while a storm has cut them off from the mainland.

Alexander Siddig, Joshua Jackson and Marisa Tomei star in this taut thriller about a man whose daughter disappears in Damascus, forcing him to return to the country he left behind more than three decades ago.

2005 film by Ruba Nadda

Alice and Jack are lucky to be living in the idealized community of Victory, the experimental company town housing the men who work for the top-secret Victory Project and their families. But when cracks in their idyllic life begin to appear, exposing flashes of something much more sinister lurking beneath the attractive façade, Alice can’t help questioning exactly what they’re doing in Victory, and why.

Oona, a recent graduate in anthropology, has returned to her dead mother’s seaside cottage in southern England to prepare it for sale. Her arrival disturbs Mani, a wary vagrant who has been squatting on the property.

The aristocratic White Mice and the rustic Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak battle over the doll of their hearts' desire.

Heather Mason and her father have been on the run, always one step ahead of dangerous forces that she doesn't fully understand, Now on the eve of her 18th birthday, plagued by horrific nightmares and the disappearance of her father, Heather discovers she's not who she thinks she is. The revelation leads her deeper into a demonic world that threatens to trap her forever.

A nomadic 16th century warrior, condemned to hell for his brutal past, seeks redemption by renouncing violence, but finds some things are worth burning for as he fights to free a young Puritan woman from the grip of evil.

In the brutal trench fighting of the First World War, a British Infantry Company is separated from their regiment after a fierce battle. Attempting to return to their lines, the British soldiers discover what appears to be a bombed out German trench, abandoned except for a few dazed German soldiers. After killing most of the Germans, and taking one prisoner, the British company fortifies to hold the trench until reinforcements can arrive. Soon, however, strange things being to happen as a sense of evil descends on the trench and the British begin turn on each other.

Juvenile delinquents are sent to a small British island after a fellow prisoner's death, where they must fight for survival.