Films Directed by Women

2021 film directed by Leigh Janiak

Chicago, the fight or flight mentality is focused on survival, a crew of girlfriends lost in trauma and grief from their past creates a robbery ring. However, things go bad when some high-profile politicians are brutally murdered, and the ladies find themselves the primary suspects.

Breakups happen. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl; girl likes boy. Boy and girl decide to sleep with 3 other people first, to avoid the rebound relationship.

Desperate to step out of her famous mother's shadow and create her own legacy, an aspiring actress is taken under the wing of an eccentric film director who makes empty promises and surrounds her with reckless friends. An obsession with success leads her to a new, fast­-paced lifestyle that eventually leaves her homeless, jobless and in the depths of a serious drug addiction.

An eminent attorney finds herself in a desperate search for her kidnapped husband.

Expanding her (White Riot: London (2017)) short documentary film, Rubika Shah's energizing film charts a vital London protest movement. Rock Against Racism (RAR) was formed in 1976, prompted by 'music's biggest colonialist' Eric Clapton and his support of racist MP Enoch Powell. White Riot (2019) blends fresh interviews with queasy archive footage to recreate a hostile environment of anti-immigrant hysteria and National Front marches. As neo-Nazis recruited the nation's youth, RAR's multicultural punk and reggae gigs provided rallying points for resistance. As founder Red Saunders explains: 'We peeled away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika'. The campaign grew from Hoxton fanzine roots to 1978's huge antifascist carnival in Victoria Park, featuring X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse and of course The Clash, whose rock star charisma and gale-force conviction took RAR's message to the masses.

Jacob Marley, a despised man by most, cheated and lied to gain fortune. He stepped on most people on his way to prosperity. Six people had the means and the motive to kill Jacob Marley. Through deceit, manipulation, careful planning and shear hatred, someone made it happen. But who?

Four childhood friends with a time machine attempt to assassinate Hitler, but when it fails, he escapes into modern day Orlando and devises a plan to take over.

The unexpected difficulty of becoming mothers through the means of artificial insemination slowly erodes the relationship between Katja and Isabella.

Asli marries Saeed in secret, even though her mother has something against Arabs and Saeed’s moods change like the weather. Then he disappears. The film tells the story of how Saeed changes Asli’s life – before the entire world is shaken.

2015 film directed by Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl

Does luck have a use by date? Both thought that at eighty they have experienced everything until, like a bolt of lightening, Rosa and Bruno come together and immediately fall head over heels. There are two obstacles to their happiness though: Bruno’s marriage, which has long been routine, and Rosa’s illness; she has cancer and not long left to live. Despite the difficult circumstances, the two decide to breakaway – Bruno from his relationship and Rosa from her retirement home. Against the advice of carers, doctors and relatives, the pair moves into a new apartment together. ANFANG 80 shows with a great deal of unequivocal humour how insensitively and sometimes desperately overburdened society reacts to love among the elderly.

2021 film directed by Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl

Two family stories, a century and two metropolises merge into one: Weina Zhao. Her parents called the little daughter "Vienna" when they emigrated from Beijing to Austria. Weina's journey back in history - from the cultural revolution to modern China - touches on the major issues of the 21st century: migration, identity and coming to terms with the past.

Mario, a young dancer living in a small village has to face the loss of his beloved best friend Lenz, victim of an attack in a gay club.

A coming-of-old-age story of an eccentric Tailor who doesn't quit fit into the world and has isolated himself into the attic of the family's tailoring shop. On the verge of losing everything, he finally gets triggered: with a wondrously strange bricolage coach-a tailor shop on wheels- he reinvents his life and his craft. He changes the brides of Athens and falls in love for the first time in his 50s.

2020 film by Kim Strobl

Imagine a sprawling city of 155,000 retired people, equipped with 54 golf courses, 70 swimming pools and its very own news organisation. The thousands of inhabitants of The Villages, in Florida, live isolated from the world in a bubble of leisure in which age is no longer an issue. But it all comes at a cost, one paid by the flora, fauna, and the local population.

While Jackie Raynal is best known as the former programmer of two of New York’s premiere art cinemas—the Carnegie Hall and the Bleecker Street—she began her career in film nearly forty years ago in Paris, where by 1964 she was the youngest film editor in France. Challenged by Zanzibar patroness Boissonnas to stop editing other people’s films and make her own, Raynal traveled to Barcelona, where she completed Deux Fois in a single week. One of the most enigmatic of the Zanzibar films, it is composed of a series of unconnected episodes, some of which are repeated. The film begins with a prologue in which Raynal (carefully made-up and fashionably dressed) is seated, head lowered and hands joined in prayer, before both her dinner and her film. While Deux Fois lays claim to the Surrealist legacy of Buñuel and Cocteau, it gained critical recognition as a pioneering work within the burgeoning feminist cinema.