Films Directed by Women

Religious and cultural tensions escalate when an African Islamic woman has an affair with a white American agnostic man.

A 1966 biopic of Francis of Assisi presents him as a troubled rebel and champion of radical brotherhood, reflecting the spirit of 1968 student protests. Praised and condemned, the film sparked controversy for its bold, dissenting portrayal of faith.

Marina, Sofía and Violeta are three teenage sisters who have just suffered the loss of the grandmother who raised them. Each one will live the mourning in her own way, in a house inhabited by a myriad of memories, responsibilities and tensions.

Martinique, in the early 1930s. Young José and his grandmother live in a small village. Nearly everyone works cutting cane and barely earning a living. The overseer can fine a worker for the smallest infraction. The way to advance is to do well in school. José studies hard and succeeds in an exam allowing him to attend school in the capital. With only a partial scholarship, the tuition is very costly. José and his grandmother move to Fort-de-France to make José's studies easier...

A desperate housewife discovers her husband is having an affair and kidnaps his unsuspecting mistress, but what starts as a prank quickly spirals out of control.

Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.

Desperate to be rid of her toddler, a dissatisfied Beverly Hills housewife hires a stranger to babysit and ends up getting much more than she bargained for.

Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.

Edith Han was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced Edith and her mother into a Jewish ghetto. Edith was taken away to a labor camp, and when she returned home months later, she found her mother had been deported. Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not. Using the woman's identity papers, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret.

An unhappy single mother in Norway's Pakistani expatriate community begins to ignore her young son in favor of placating a Swedish filmmaker she thinks could change her life for the better.

A cabaret dancer who was raised in a brothel sets out to find her biological mother.

Based on a true story, Yoshiko and Yuriko relates the journey and great love affair of Yoshiko, who was a renowned translator of Russian literature and drama, and Yuriko, who was a feminist novelist and great activist of the post-war democratic literature movement. Both have left huge marks on Japanese literary history. The two women shared a strong attraction to each other from their first meeting and enjoyed a powerful love affair. Yoshiko reveals that she's an out lesbian, whilst Yuriko is married (not altogether happily) to a well-known scholar - a situation she can't walk away from with ease.

American Masters: Season 17, Episode 5

A couple of bickering, married performers agree to star in a "Mr. and Mrs." TV show.

In 1950s France, a free-spirited woman trapped in an arranged marriage falls in love with an injured veteran of the Indochinese War.

In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.

A shy caretaker believes that the father of her teenage charge is falling in love with her, unaware that she is actually the victim of the girl's prank.

A woman trapped in an unhappy marriage: Sima, must contend with a husband so insensitive that he makes no effort to hide his various sexual indiscretions. He forces her into an even more uncomfortable situation when he asks his wife to pretend she is related to his current girlfriend in order to avoid trouble from a society that punishes unmarried couples for being together in public.

Three poor Black kids in rural Mississippi reap the consequences of their family's cycle of abuse, addiction, and violence.

From the late 1950s through the '70s, more than 90,000 of the ethnic Koreans in Japan emigrated to North Korea, a country that promised them affluence, justice, and an end to discrimination. KAZOKU NO KUNI tells the story of one of their number, who returns for just a short period. For the first time in 25 years, Sonho is reunited with his family in Tokyo after being allowed to undergo an operation there. Sonho’s younger sister Rie is at the centre of the film, and is not hard to recognise as the director’s alter-ego. In her documentaries DEAR PYONGYANG and SONA, THE OTHER MYSELF, Yang Yonghi told the story of her own life, and how, at age six, she experienced the departure of her three older brothers, who left their family for Pyongyang.