Films Directed by Women

Una historia de la Transición española contada en primera persona por los principales protagonistas: por un lado, los políticos, idealistas o meramente oportunistas, que la llevaron a buen término en las tribunas y los despachos; por otro lado, los ciudadanos que, en las calles, la apoyaron sinceramente o la combatieron con ferocidad. (Precedida por «No se os puede dejar solos»).

Ana is Catalan, daughter of a bourgeois family and works in a studio in advertising. She is 38 years old and has only lived with her husband, with whom she has a relationship cold but accepted by both. Although his family is opposed, decides to leave her husband and takes a vacation with her daughter Barbara, of 12 years, in order to leave behind all the past and start a freer life, with fewer ties, less conventional.

The story of a friendship between two girls of different races, Susana and Rita, in Equatorial Guinea, from 1950 to 1961. Susana discovers with her friend a fascinating but troubled new world in Africa, where she comes of age and experiences love and sex.

Rebekka, Claudia and Sofie are freshmen in high school and will no longer accept being treated as juniors. Taking matters into their own hands, they devise a rite of passage, the 'fortune teller', symbolizing their entry into adulthood. As they take turns challenging each other's sexual boundaries, they eventually have to ask themselves whether performing weird rituals is the easiest way to get to know themselves and feel grown up.

Kauffmann, who was the Danish ambassador to Washington in 1939 when World War II started and who declared himself to be the only true representative of a free Denmark in opposition to the Nazis

Behind the closed doors of the Copenhagen-based women's shelter, the women and children are slowly recovering after having escaped domestic violence. Day by day the women are processing their traumas, building confidence and slowly understanding what it takes to break the cycle of violence.

Longtime friends and party lovers Laura and Tyler navigate life and love in Dublin, Ireland but find themselves drifting apart when Laura becomes engaged.

In Los Angeles, a 40-year-old actress works to make it in the cutthroat business of Hollywood while contending with ever-youthful competition.

2021 film directed by Maria Schrader

Monika Treut’s Gendernauts was one of the first films to portray the transgender movement in San Francisco. Twenty years after the film screened in Panorama in 1999, Treut seeks out the pioneers of that time. What has changed? How have the lives of the protagonists evolved? San Francisco was once, as Annie Sprinkle puts it, the “clitoris of the USA”, but today the tech industry has a firm grip on the city. Aggressive gentrification has displaced the genderqueer community of yesteryear. Under the Trump administration, hard-won transgender rights are under massive pressure as protection against discrimination in healthcare and freedom of choice in the use of public toilets are rolled back.
Alternating between quiet, unobtrusive images and flashbacks, the film delineates how the gendernauts have grown into their identities over the years, developed their careers and started families, and how their energy continues to have an impact today. Their activism has changed over time, but the struggles continue. New perspectives have been added – such as the relationship between humankind and nature in the Anthroprocene epoch – but also the question of how they want to live in old age.

A palliative care team visits homes of terminally ill patients to help them come to terms with the inevitability of death.

Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.

In 2010, 81 inmates died in a huge fire at San Miguel prison in Chile’s capital city Santiago. Inside, they were trapped behind bars like rats; outside, dozens of family members waiting for visiting hours to begin looked on helplessly as their loved ones shouted for help. The doors remained locked. This reconstruction sheds light on the utter failure of the prison’s administration, which was housing twice as many prisoners as permitted.

Berlin. Summer 2018. They are 17 years old. The diverse neighborhood they grew up in is one big construction site, where people have to give way to the dreams of others. They drift through the city and wonder how anyone will be able to live in this city in the future. They are always in discussion: about everyday sexism, the individual's responsibility for the system in which we live. What is happening and what should happen is in contradiction, but they keep the faith.

A work that is both narrative and experimental, with the omnipresence of a strange, disturbing and playful piano for the chaotic journey of its central character which does not fail to intrigue.

2021 film directed by Amy Poehler

After Rémi infidelity, Lila, who loved him more than anything, has a hard time dealing with their break-up. One day, he announces that he will travel alone to Bolivia to soul-search and try
to understand his mistakes. There, he lets her know that their love story is not over. Between discussions, seeking for comfort and encouragement from her friends, and the madness of love, Lila loses herself.

A documentary film directed by French Agnès Varda as an extension of the exhibition 'L'île et elle'. The installation 'Les veuves de Noirmoutier' (or 'The Widows of Noirmoutier') had various women filmed by Varda, young and old, who spoke about their widowhood and their residence on the island of Noirmoutier. The film is a montage of these meetings, which are both simple and melancholic.